


And If I Call For You

by Wynn



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Adult Content, Adult Language, Alternate Universe, Bucky is a cop, Complicated Relationships, Darcy is a bounty hunter, F/M, Gratuitous Star Wars References, Happy Ending, Many other Marvel characters are mentioned, Night Terrors, Or make brief appearances, Past Bucky Barnes/Jemma Simmons, Past Darcy Lewis/Clint Barton - Freeform, Past Darcy Lewis/Ian Boothby, References to PTSD, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 14:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3176032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wynn/pseuds/Wynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky sighs and closes his eyes. Of course. <em>Of course</em>. Who else would it be? Who else would be simultaneously gutsy and stupid enough to break into the house of a man on the run from six outstanding charges in the middle of the goddamn afternoon? Only Darcy, the prickly thorn in his increasingly bleeding side. At least now he knows why Mrs. Monroe called his ma rather than the precinct. Everyone called Bucky whenever the matter concerned Darcy Lewis, and matters <em>always</em> concerned Darcy Lewis, no matter the fact that they broke up more than six years ago</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> For those wondering where the last 2 chapters of "And The Wounded Sing" are, they will be written. I needed a break after 4 months of heavy Bucky angst, so what do I do? Write _more_ Bucky angst, this time in an AU. This AU is inspired by Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, in which Darcy takes after Stephanie the semi-competent bounty hunter and Bucky after Morelli the hot, overprotective cop, but this fic is not as spastic as those books as I tend to mire myself in angst. C'est la vie.
> 
> The first chapter is a revised version of one of the AUs in "Alternate World (Alternate Age)." Updates are planned for once a week as all parts are planned and just need to be written in actual words. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> General disclaimer applies: The characters belong to Marvel and are used for non-profit, entertainment purposes only.
> 
> Title from "It's Never Over (Oh Orpheus)" by Arcade Fire.

_And if I call for you_  
_Oh, Orpheus!_  
_Just sing for me all night_  
_We'll wait until it's over_  
_Wait until it's through_  
\- 

There were days when Bucky seriously regretted becoming a cop. Days belligerent snot-nosed punks spit on him as he hauled them in for illegal graffiti, days drunk domestic abusers got in a lucky kick or punch before he landed a few of his own, days that he stared at death, at a body on the ground or in a car or in a ditch somewhere and he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he would never find out who killed them. 

Today, though, is not one of those days.

Today he stands in the small alley between old Mrs. Monroe’s house and the one belonging to wanted fugitive Jay Chesterson, and he stares up at the most gorgeous ass that he’s ever seen. Currently the ass, in a pair of dark denim jeans that disappear into tall black boots, wiggles as the body to which it belongs hangs halfway through the open window of Jay Chesterson’s kitchen. Bucky hears a grunt and then the legs extending from the most gorgeous ass that he’s ever seen kick out at him, providing the leverage needed for the body to haul itself further through the widow. He takes a moment to admire the delicate balance, and, again, the gorgeous ass, before he remembers the hawkish gaze of old Mrs. Monroe, likely reporting his every move to his ma in a whispered phone conversation. Sighing, he reaches up then and snags one of the waving black boots only to let it go a second later as it kicks out at him.

“I’ve got a tazer _and_ pepper spray,” the body squawks at him from the window, “so unless you want to end up face-down and drooling in a pile of alley piss, I suggest you keep on trucking, buddy.”

Bucky sighs and closes his eyes. Of course. _Of course_. Who else would it be? Who else would be simultaneously gutsy and stupid enough to break into the house of a man on the run from six outstanding charges in the middle of the goddamn afternoon? Only Darcy, the prickly thorn in his increasingly bleeding side. At least now he knows why Mrs. Monroe called his ma rather than the precinct. Everyone called Bucky whenever the matter concerned Darcy Lewis, and matters _always_ concerned Darcy Lewis, no matter the fact that they broke up more than six years ago.

Sighing again, Bucky opens his eyes. He glances up once more at the undoubtedly gorgeous and troublemaking ass before preparing for doom. “Try it, sweetheart, and I’ll have to arrest you for assaulting a police officer.”

The legs freeze. Bucky hears Darcy curse. She cants back far enough to peek over her shoulder and out the window at him, wincing when they lock eyes. She turns back around, and Bucky can nearly picture her face, her nose scrunched and her eyes squeezed shut, as she figures out how best to play this. Confrontational? Indifferent? Conciliatory? He swipes a hand back through his too-long hair and waits, placing bets on the former rather than the latter given prior history.

Darcy doesn’t make him wait long.

“Top o’ the morning to you, Detective!” she chirps out, twisting around until she sits facing him on the windowsill. She takes his breath away as she always has, her mouth lush and battle red, her hair down and blowing in the breeze, but she aggravates him as she always has, arching an imperious brow at him as though he were the wrongdoer here and she the righteous citizen. She might not consider herself to be particularly moral or righteous, but he knows she definitely views him as the wrongdoer in any situation concerning them, so confrontational it is then.

“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon,” he says, striving for calm. “And it’s Sergeant now.”

Darcy frowns down at him. “Since when?”

“Since about three weeks ago.”

The imperiousness flickers. Bucky sees a small smile, quickly formed yet genuine in its pleasure for him passing the Sergeant’s exam. Yet as quickly as it forms, Darcy squashes it just as fast, tilting her chin up to stare down at him. “Well, _Sergeant_ , like I said before, you can just keep on trucking because I haven’t broken any laws.”

Bucky peers up at her, perched on the window ten feet in the air, and cocks a brow.

“I haven’t,” she insists. “The window was open. It’s not a crime to look.”

“I’d say you were doing a damn sight more than looking.”

“I didn’t break in. You can’t arrest me for breaking and entering.”

Bucky sighs again. “Darcy, I’m not going to arrest you, even if you were doing a B&E. Can you just get down from there? Do you even know what this guy did?”

Her lips thin. “Yes, I do. I’m not a rookie, Barnes.”

The use of his last name makes him tense. “Then why are you here? Barton’s supposed to send Bobbi after the violent ones.”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “The guy chucked a toaster at Dum-Dum’s head. That’s not exactly the work of a hardened criminal.”

“He threw a toaster at him and then he tried to run over Dugan with his _car_. And he’s got priors, Darcy. For assault.”

“Hence the tazer and the pepper spray. Plus, Sif’s been giving me self-defense lessons. She says I’m getting pretty good.” She pauses and purses her lips. “I could probably kick your ass now.”

His nostrils flare, but Bucky doesn’t otherwise rise to the bait. Instead, he stares up at Darcy and she stares down at him, neither giving an inch. The impasse lasts approximately seven seconds before Darcy speaks because she never met a silence she couldn’t fill.

“What are you doing here anyway? You haven’t done patrol work in years.”

“I’m not now. Mrs. Monroe called my ma. Said there was a suspicious character lurking about.” He sends her a tight smile as he continues. “She was right.”

Darcy’s mouth compresses again. She looks up at Mrs. Monroe’s house, and presumably at Mrs. Monroe, and sends a scowl at both. “She needs to mind her own business.”

“So says the woman dangling out of some perp’s window.”

Now Darcy directs the scowl down at him. “I’m doing my job. Which I should get back to now, so if you’ll be on your way.” She waves a hand at him, trying to shoo him down the alley.

“You know that’s not going to happen. I’m not going to leave you here alone.”

Her scowl deepens. “I’m not some damsel for you to save. And even if I needed saving, it wouldn’t be by you. I’m not your concern anymore. I haven’t been for a long time.”

Bucky breaks then, dropping his gaze. He stares at the trashcan in front of him, what Darcy must have used to haul herself up to the window. He feels the first stirrings of anger in his gut, mixed with familiar ache in all matters concerning her. Clenching his jaw, he takes a few moments to breathe in, to calm down, before looking up at her again. “Yes. I know you’re not. You’ve made that abundantly clear. So as soon as you get down from the goddamn window, I’ll go.”

The impasse returns. Bucky plants his feet and crosses his arms over his chest. Darcy tightens her grip on the windowsill. He preps for round two, scrounging his brain for whatever might lure her down, then debating the wisdom of trying to haul himself up next to her, when she tenses and glances back over her shoulder. Bucky sees her eyes widen. Darcy opens her mouth, but before she can say anything, she’s being shoved off the windowsill and into the air. He has enough time to glimpse Jay Chesterson scowling down at them before Darcy lands on him, sending them both crashing to the ground. 

The air leaves his chest in a rush as he hits the asphalt and as Darcy hits him. Bucky lays still a moment, dazed and breathless, a twinge radiating through his left shoulder. Then his current arrangement processes. Darcy sprawls on top of him, warm and soft, her face inches from his. Her hair envelops them, nearly blocking out the scant afternoon sun shining into the alley, and he flashes back to the last time they were like this, three years past, the night of Steve and Peggy’s wedding. Bucky thought that she’d forgiven him then, forgiven him for his shortfall when he was twenty-one and fresh back from the army, scared shitless at the prospect of her being pregnant and furious at her for not telling him. She hadn’t been pregnant, she had learned that four days later, but by then the fights had been fought and the damage had been done. Darcy hadn’t forgiven him either, not completely, slipping out of his hotel room the day after the wedding before Bucky woke and running off after to marry Ian the Intern in Atlantic City. 

And now she’s here, looking at him and touching him, and he can’t help it, though he knows he should because she was right. She’s not his concern. She walked away, the first and the second time, but his body rejects what his mind recalls and he drags his thumb across her waist in a soft caress. Darcy’s eyes widen. Her mouth opens, but whatever she’s about to say vanishes when the sound of a door slamming shut penetrates the fog surrounding them. Darcy perks up like a damn bloodhound then, arching up to listen. The arch puts her breasts squarely in his face, and Bucky tries not to look, but he does, gazing at them like Tantalus at his forbidden fruit.

A car starts in the distance. Darcy curses, at Bucky, at gravity, at her perp escaping, before she jumps off him to chase after Chesterson. Bucky lies still a moment, again dazed and breathless, at her, at his own damn stupidity. Closing his eyes, he knocks his head back against the asphalt then he hears Darcy shout and he’s up and charging down the alley, reaching the end in time to catch her again as she dives to evade Chesterson and his car. 

They hit the ground again, but there’s no gazing this time. Darcy’s up and off of him almost as soon as they hit, turning away, but not before he catches the flush to her face. 

Bucky frowns at her. “Are you—”

“I’m fine,” she mutters, wiping her palms on her jeans. 

His frown deepens. She doesn’t look at him as he stands. Instead, she keeps her jaw clenched and her gaze fixed on the spot of road where Chesterson disappeared. Whether the clenched jaw is for Bucky or for Chesterson or for the both of them, Bucky doesn’t know, but he doesn’t care. Reaching into his jacket pocket, glaring at his shaking hand as he does, he pulls out his cell then calls Steve, who answers after two rings.

“Rogers.”

“Put out an APB on Jay Chester—”

“What? No!” Darcy turns then and lunges for Bucky. She latches her hands around his wrist and drags it away from his ear. “Do you know how much his bond is worth?”

“I don’t care,” Bucky says as he tries to wrench his arm away. “He tried to run you down.”

Darcy digs in, both with her feet and her nails. “And I’ll taze him in the ass for it when I catch him. Twice.”

Bucky winces from the bite of her nails into his arm, but he doesn’t give in. “Or he’ll break out his baseball bat and beat the shit out of you, Darcy. I can’t—”

“You can and you—”

“No! I can’t. Not again.”

Darcy stops trying to fight him. Her eyes go wide and her hands slacken in their grip enough for Bucky to pull away, but all he does is drop his gaze. The silence between them enhances the hiss of the still open line. Bucky closes his eyes at the sound. No doubt Steve heard what he just said and would want to talk about it later, would want to rehash the past that he’s nearly got locked away, Darcy crumpled and bleeding and left for dead after trying to catch Brock Rumlow alone. It had been her fourth job for Barton, Darcy taking up bounty hunting after her divorce from Ian. She’d spent a week in the hospital, the longest week of Bucky’s life, including his army tour, long enough for him to break Barton’s nose for hiring her, for Jemma to finally leave him, for Steve to catch Rumlow and lock him away before Bucky found him and likely killed him.

Darcy’s hands tighten on his arm again, not in a violent death grip this time but in something like a reassuring squeeze. His eyes fly up to hers and he finds them the softest they’ve been towards him since she woke in the hospital nearly a year ago, Bucky asleep by her side.

“Chesterson’s not Rumlow,” she murmurs now. “Even if he was, I’m not stupid enough to try that again. I’m happy to leave the psychos to Bobbi. But that doesn’t leave me much. Not the kind that pay. I need this bond, Bucky.” 

Bucky nearly says that she needed a new job, but he’d gone down that road when she returned to work for Barton and all that had gotten him was her walking away from him again. He glances at the phone, still hissing, Steve still waiting for this to play out, then he looks at her hands on his arm and up into her eyes, her expression quiet but firm. He can’t help but sigh as the fight leaves him. “Okay. Okay. But the next time you go after him you take Thor with you.”

“Fine. Yes. Will do.”

Bucky looks at her, squinting at the swiftness of her response.

Darcy sighs and releases his arm. “I’ll call him. I promise. But time is money and money is pizza and rent, so I need to go get him before he decides to blow town.”

Bucky blows out another breath. Already regretting the decision, he lifts his phone to his ear and says to Steve, “Cancel that.”

“You sure?” Steve asks.

Bucky stares at Darcy a moment. She lifts a brow at him, which is better than a raised chin, which was better than shaking hands, which was better than the sight of her turning and walking away. “No,” he says, closing his eyes again. “But do it.”

“Okay.”

Steve clicks off. Bucky opens his eyes and switches off his phone, shoving it and his hands into his jacket pockets. He expects Darcy to turn heel and run after her FTA then, but she doesn’t. She stays before him instead, watching him. Bucky can’t meet her eyes though, too afraid of what she might see. A few seconds pass and then she reaches out and lays her hand on his arm.

“Thank you.”

He nods in response, his throat tight. Her nails are black, coated in something that makes them shimmer like stars. As she pulls her hand away, he says, unable to stop himself, “Call if you need help. It doesn’t matter when.”

Darcy says nothing, so long that Bucky finally glances up at her. He can’t read the expression on her face. He tries to keep everything at bay, tries to summon the fixed stare of the cop, then the quiet gaze of a friend, anything but the riot that she stirs within him. He doesn’t know if he fails or if he succeeds. She nods at him a moment later, and he watches as she slides her hand into the pocket of her coat. When she retracts it, she clutches a pair of sunglasses, the red heart frames he won for her in a carnival his senior year. His breath stills at the sight and his eyes fly up to hers again, but she’s got them closed and keeps them closed until she dons the glasses and then he can only see a faint glimmer of her eyes. She smiles, though, and a smile is better than a smirk, which is better than a frown, which is better than a scowl.

“Will do.” She starts to back away, up the sidewalk toward her car. As she goes, she lifts her hand and gives him a jaunty salute. “Catch you on the flipside, Sarge.”

*


	2. Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darcy doesn’t call him, but Skye does, just as Bucky’s sitting down to a late dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shifting the posting date to Sundays, in part because I'll actually have time to post then since I don't work on Sundays and because I wanted to get a fresh part up, the first being a repost of the AU ficlet.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who's left comments, kudos, or bookmarked so far! I am enjoying the hell out of this little verse, even if it became angstier than I intended it to be, and it rocks my socks that others are too. If you're interested, I made a playlist for the fic: https://8tracks.com/ficbyjwynn/pull-out-your-heart
> 
> A bit of story headcanon: Sharon & Peggy are sisters here; their dad is Colonel Philips (now known as Colonel Philip Carter). He married Darcy’s mom when Darcy was about 11. Peter Quill’s is Darcy’s cousin on her mom’s side. Peggy & Steve have a kid named Sarah, named, of course, after his mom. Bucky’s dog is named after Philip Marlowe, the main character in The Big Sleep & other Raymond Chandler novels.

And If I Call For You  
Part Two

 

Darcy doesn’t call him, but Skye does, just as Bucky’s sitting down to a late dinner. 

“Barnes,” he barks out around a mouthful of pasta.

“Sarge, it’s Johnson.”

She’s whispering, which makes Bucky frown. Skye was usually unafraid to speak her mind, even to her superiors, which included him. Dropping his fork, he mutes the baseball game on the TV and says, “What is it?”

“It’s Darcy.” 

The two words make him close his eyes. Of course. Of _course_ she hadn’t called Thor because if she had she wouldn’t be in whatever predicament she was in now, Thor built like a Scandinavian brickhouse and thus perfectly capable of dissuading even the most ornery of perps from starting trouble. Lifting a hand, he pinches the bridge of his nose and says, “What happened?”

Skye recounts an epic chase through the mall (why the hell Chesterson would go to the goddamn mall after narrowly avoiding a pick-up for his failure to appear in court Bucky doesn’t know), a chase that included Darcy losing him by the food court only to find him slashing the tires of her car, which resulted in the two getting into a fistfight with each other. 

This makes Bucky open his eyes. “Is she okay?” 

“I think so. She’s got a pretty wicked bruise on her face and some visible scrapes. Maybe a hurt rib or two. I don’t know. She won’t let the EMT check it out.”

Of course she wouldn’t. Bounty hunting didn’t exactly come with health insurance, though, in contrast to other bail bondsman that Bucky had met, Barton was fair and actually cared about the welfare of his employees. Though not enough to stop Darcy from going after a man with a history of violent outbursts.

“Chesterson?” he asks, reaching to take a sip of his beer in lieu of punching Barton in the face.

“Nada. Which is why I’m calling, orders notwithstanding. Bystanders said he parted with some pretty nasty threats. Something about a baseball bat, so…”

Bucky stands then. At the other end of the couch, Marlowe perks up his head. He watches Bucky grab his plate, scrambling to his feet when he realizes that Bucky intends to move to the kitchen, otherwise known as paradise on Earth for enormous black Labs that would hoover up their body weight in food if left unchecked.

Tucking the phone between his chin and shoulder, Bucky opens the fridge door. “Has she called anyone yet?”

“I don’t think so. Trip’s still talking to her. If she did before we showed up, no one’s come yet. Should I call—”

“No. I’ll give her a ride.” Bucky shoves his plate into the fridge and, turning, closes the door. “Just give me ten.”

“Gotcha.” 

Bucky crosses back through the living room. He reaches for the remote to switch off the TV, expecting Skye to hang up then, but she doesn’t. The tenor of her silence compels him to speak.

“What is it?”

She pulls in a sharp breath. Bucky moves to the door, grabs his coat from the rack, and shrugs it on as she hesitates or gathers her thoughts. He hears her say something, not to him, maybe to Trip. Maybe even to Darcy, he can’t tell. A second later, the din in the background quiets and Skye says, “Darcy seems shaken up. She’s trying hard not to look it, but I think she is.”

Bucky steps outside. “Okay.”

“So,” she says as he closes and locks his front door, “maybe you could reign in the overprotective caveman bit when you get here, okay? Darcy already knows she fucked up. And she already asked me not to call you, so she doesn’t need the trifecta of suck with her fucking up _and_ you showing up _and_ you throwing her fuck up in her face.”

The comment stings. “I wasn’t planning on it. What the hell kind of person do you think I am?”

Skye doesn’t hesitate. “Someone who tends to lose all his sane parts when it comes to Darcy. Particularly when she gets hurt.”

The reference, like the comment before it, stings. The last time that he lost his sane parts and slid into overprotective mode had been after Rumlow hurt Darcy, an occurrence to which Skye had a front row seat, both being in the squad room when Bucky received the call and, of course, being best friends with Jemma, who had left Bucky shortly thereafter, deserving more than a man still half in love with his ex. 

Jaw tightening at the unwanted remembrance, Bucky jabs the unlock button on his car remote. “Your advice has been duly noted, Deputy. Now, I’ll be there in ten. Make sure she stays until I get there.”

There’s a beat of silence. In it, Bucky thinks he hears Skye sigh, but her voice is composed when she says, “Yes, sir. See you in ten.”

*

He arrives in eight, finding the whole circus outside Macy’s, the patrol cars and the ambulance, the thinning ring of rubberneckers, and the tow truck, currently backing up toward Darcy’s small hatchback. Bucky parks a few spaces from the patrol cars. He can’t see Darcy, but he can see Skye and Trip by their car and the corner of an open door, Darcy likely sitting inside. He takes a moment to collect himself before stepping from the car, before incurring whatever wrath he will from Darcy for his second unwanted interference in her business in one day.

He doesn’t have to wait long.

“You called him?!” Darcy asks as soon as she sees Bucky. She sits in the backseat of Skye’s car, her legs swung out onto the pavement. There’s a rip in her jeans across her right knee and similar abrasions marring her hands. But it’s the bruise spanning her left cheekbone that makes a muscle in his jaw twitch.

Skye twitches too but otherwise keeps her eyes fixed on her notepad. “Standing orders.”

Darcy narrows her eyes at Skye, but the glare yields nothing as Skye refuses to turn her head. Darcy shifts her scowl to Trip then, but he finds a convenient spot on the ground at which to stare. Out of options, Darcy finally turns and looks at Bucky. She adds a tight mouth to her narrowed eyes as she peers at him, and he sucks in a deep breath to prepare for Round Two.

“What does she mean?” she asks when he arrives.

Each word comes clipped and sharpened, Darcy snapping down especially hard on the ‘t.’ Bucky presses his lips together, her earlier retort about not being his concern flashing into his mind. “I’ll tell you in the car,” he says, gesturing for her to follow.

She doesn’t. She tries to cross her arms over her chest instead, but unfolds them a second later, the movement accompanied by a wince of pain. Definitely a bruised rib, maybe a few. The pain, though, doesn’t prevent her from tilting her chin up and staring him down. “I think you should tell me now.”

The resistance makes him want to sigh. So too does the prospect of another fight with her, especially one with a live audience. He feels their gazes keenly, Skye and Trip, the EMTs, the few witnesses still gathered round, all of them waiting for his reaction, for the predictable eruption that occurs whenever he and Darcy are in close proximity now. And Bucky wants to fulfill their expectations. He wants to yell at her for her pigheadedness, for ignoring both his advice and his offer to help. But he also wants to wrap her in a blanket, plop her down onto his couch, and never let her leave, the bruise that she sports twisting at his gut. He does neither, though, running a hand through his hair instead and letting loose a soft sigh. 

“Just… come on,” he says. “You need a ride. I’m offering one. It’s not—” He stops and shakes his head then. The fight, nascent as it is, exhausts him. Her hating him exhausts him. Her getting hurt exhausts him, him being unable to do anything about it exhausts him, everything about the past few hours and the next few hours and the past few years exhausts him. Bucky looks at Darcy, and some of what he feels must show on his face, for her hostility fades, enough for him to say, “I’m just trying to help.”

Darcy resists a moment longer then her shoulders slump and the fight leaves her. “Okay. Okay, let me get my coat.”

She turns then and reaches back into the car for her bag and coat. His jaw clenches at the stiff way that she moves. Bucky wants nothing more than an hour alone with Jay Chesterson along with unrestricted access to his weapons locker. He tries to reign in those thoughts though, Skye in his periphery and her eyes intent upon him. 

“Put out an APB on Chesterson,” he says to her as Darcy approaches. “Fresh charges for assault, criminal attempt, vandalism, disturbing the peace, whatever else you got.” 

Skye nods. Her eyes drift to Darcy as she walks past, and it’s then Bucky remembers that the two used to be friends. Darcy had pulled away when Skye joined the force, even more when Bucky started dating Jemma. There had been no fight between them, just a quiet letting go from Darcy as she attempted to excise Bucky from her life and an equally quiet acceptance from Skye. Maybe now, he starts to think, but he banishes the thought before it fully forms, his own history with Darcy proof that sometimes the past couldn’t be reclaimed.

“And have Dum-Dum fix her car,” he adds quietly before turning to follow. “Send me the bill.”

Skye nods again. Bucky follows Darcy to his car. She reaches the passenger door before he can and slips inside, not waiting for him to open it for her. His hand tightens on his keys and he tries to breathe in as he circles the car, a long, slow one recommended by his therapist after returning from Afghanistan, one to center himself and to ease his troubled mind in times of stress. The breath, of course, does neither, so he continues on, opening the door and climbing into the car.

The din of the parking lot dims as he shuts the door behind him, plunging him and Darcy into near silence. From the corners of his eyes, he sees her perched tense in the seat, as though she sat on paper, as though the bottom would fall through if she shifted the wrong way or settled down too much. How much of that derived from her injuries and how much from being trapped in a car with him Bucky doesn’t know. Likely an equal division between the two, or a forty-sixty split, emotions the crueler kind of pain inflicted upon a person. Lifting a hand, Bucky rubs it across his face. He debates a moment how to proceed, how ease the latter for her and to spare them both an argument. Nothing eloquent though comes to mind, his thoughts dominated by one inquiry only. Lacking anything else, he follows it, despite the potential blowback such a question may inspire.

“Are you okay?”

Silence follows his question. Bucky stares straight ahead, through the windshield at a mom and two kids as they walk past, twisting back to peer at the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles. 

“I know what you said,” he continues, the silence, the rejection it implies, digging under his skin. “That you’re not my concern anymore. And I’m not trying to make you. I just… Are you okay?”

More silence, so long that Bucky draws in another breath for a sigh. He fiddles with the keys in his hands, leans his head back against the seat, and waits, waits for her reaction, for her, again, to set the tone of their interaction. Confrontational? Conciliatory? 

A few more seconds pass before Darcy does. She shifts slightly. Bucky sees her wince again and the leather of her seat squeaks as she settles down, but she looks at him as she mutters, “I think that fucker bruised some ribs.”

He laughs at that. He can’t help it, the tension too much and her response so welcome yet so her, but thankfully Darcy smiles in response, a small one, a tired one and one strained from the pain, yet still a smile.

“I blacked his eye though,” she continues, tilting her head toward him. “Tried to knee him in the balls, but that’s when he, you know, knocked me down and kind of punched me in the face.”

Bucky arches a brow. “Kind of?”

“It was more like he shoved his hand into my face really hard. No form at all.”

Bucky’s mouth flattens. “You don’t really need form when you’ve got a baseball bat with you.”

Darcy winces again and looks back through the windshield. “Skye told you what he said.”

“Not in so many words. Just that he threatened you before he left.” He hesitates to say the rest, the ground finally steady between them, but he does, safety trumping stability every time. “You shouldn’t be alone tonight. He’s escalating, and he might come after you again. Which is not to say you can’t take care of yourself. It’s just—”

“I know what you mean.”

Bucky nods. Darcy, though, doesn’t look at him. She stares down at her lap instead, at her hands and the tip of her sunglasses peeking out from her pocket. He blames them, the memory of her sliding them on that afternoon, the red of the frames matching the color of her lips, the memory of her wearing them to bed the night of her graduation, not the first time for them but one of the last, Bucky shipping off for Basic soon after. He blames them for what he says next.

“You could stay with me.”

Her head jerks up. Bucky looks away, back out the window at the emptying lot, the squad cars gone now and the ambulance too. “Or I can take you somewhere else,” he says, trying to keep his voice neutral. “Sharon’s or Peggy’s. Thor’s. Or Sif’s if you want. Wherever.”

Darcy doesn’t respond. Bucky feels her gaze intent upon him. He ducks his head and toys with his keys again. They ding and clank in the silence. He clears his throat, squirming a bit the longer the silence persists, then swallows before drawing in a breath to say something, anything of substance, or just anything to fill the silence, when Darcy finally does.

“Sif’s out of town. Judo competition,” she clarifies when Bucky looks at her. Darcy doesn’t look at him though. She mirrors his earlier pose, staring out the windshield at the dark evening sky. She bites down on her bottom lip a moment then adds abruptly, “Thor’s gone too. Something to do with his whackadoo brother.”

“Oh.”

“Which,” she says, plucking at the rip on her jeans, “I didn’t know about until I tried to call him this afternoon. Just so you know. I didn’t _completely_ ignore your advice.”

Just the me part, Bucky thinks, but he doesn’t say it. He nods instead and Darcy does too and they fall into silence again. She stares out the window and he stares at her, Bucky aware that he stares but unable to stop himself. “So,” he says after a moment, “I guess Carter 1 or 2 then.”

She shrugs in response.

“No?”

Darcy shrugs again. Her hands tighten on her coat.

“Darcy—”

“Sharon snores,” she blurts out, the admission loud enough to make him blink. “A lot. A lot and loud. Like a train. Like two trains. Like two trains that snore.”

Bucky blinks again. “Okay,” he says slowly. “Carter 1 it is.” He switches his keys from his right hand to his left before reaching into his coat pocket for his phone. “I’ll call Steve and—”

“No. I don’t— I, uh…” 

Bucky arches a brow at her floundering. The only time she ever had with him had been after his return from Afghanistan, when everything that everyone said or did scraped him raw. He resists the urge to sigh now, just wanting her to say whatever it is she won’t say, no matter how it might affect him. “You what?” he asks, twisting toward her.

Her eyes dart toward him and then away. She opens her mouth, closes it a moment later, then glances at him a second time before turning to face the passenger window. “They got the rugrat,” she says with another shrug. “I don’t want to intrude.” 

“You wouldn’t be. The munchkin loves you. Though,” he concedes, “you might not want to be climbed on all night by a hyperactive two-year-old. Although if you came to my place,” he adds, trying to smile, “you’d be drooled on all night by Marlowe, so there’s that.”

Darcy nods, a faint one that he only catches because he’s still staring at her. Bucky waits, but she says nothing else, and he gives in now to his sigh. He knows better than to mention the Colonel or her mom. She got along well with her mom, less so with Papa Carter, her teenage years, and Bucky’s place in them, a continual well of conflict for the two. And the less said about her real dad the better, the subject sure to plunge Darcy into an abysmally foul mood. Jane couldn’t protect her if Chesterson tracked her down, Quill lived too far away and was half a criminal himself, and the other people that could keep Darcy safe and thus keep Bucky sane were cops and thus, in her view, on “his” side.

Except for one.

His nostrils flare at the possibility. But the specter of Skye looms large before him, so he says it anyway despite his disinclination, despite the way his hand twitches in an innate need to punch.

“What about Barton?”

Darcy finally looks at him. She cocks a brow and a hint of a smile plays about her mouth. “And have you punch him again? I don’t think he’d let you do it a third time.”

He wouldn’t. Barton only let Bucky do it the second time because he felt responsible for what Rumlow did to Darcy, he being the one to give Darcy the case. The first time he brushed it off too, Bucky wrung thin and close to snapping from the trauma of war and the end of things with Darcy, from finding her with Barton, slipping out of his place three weeks after they had broken up.

“Besides,” Darcy says, breaking him from his thoughts, “he’s already holed up at Bobbi’s.” At his frown, she clarifies. “Someone ratted us out, told him about our run-in this afternoon. Kate said he rabbited to safer ground about two minutes after hanging up.” She relaxes back against the seat, the hint of a smile still there. “No, your place is fine. If you really don’t mind.”

Bucky blinks, sideswiped by her quick turnaround. “I don’t. I wouldn’t have offered if I did.”

Her smile grows. “Yes, you would have. You may have a motorcycle, dude, but you’re a knight through and through. Always protecting people.”

He tries not to read anything into her acceptance, into the way she smiles at him now. He tries not to feel hope. He tries not to feel anything but gratitude that she’ll be safe for the night. But he can’t help but smile in return, his wry and self-effacing. “Okay, yes, I would have. But I don’t mind. Really. I finished the basement and moved all my gym stuff there, so there’s actually a bed in the spare room now.” He lifts his keys and grabs the steering wheel. “I can’t guarantee that Marlowe won’t try to sleep with you though. Or on you,” he adds, starting the car.

Her smile shutters a bit. She glances away, off through the windshield. “He always was a bed hog.”

Bucky freezes. Of course. Of course she knew, Darcy with him when he first got Marlowe after the war and then staying with him after being released from the hospital after Rumlow. He feels the newly gained ease in the conversation wobble and threaten to fall until Darcy shrugs again, faux casual. 

“I don’t mind the potential drool. As long as you have ice cream and a hot shower, we’re good to go.”

The tightness in his chest loosens at their avoidance of the abyss. “Then you’re good,” he says, putting the car into reverse, “because I’ve got both.”

*


	3. Part Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky and Darcy arrive at his house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those with pets, hopefully you will sympathize with the affectionate cursing that Bucky directs toward his dog. I have referred to my pet on more than one occasion as a ‘furry asshole’ and he is the light of my life. ☺ 
> 
> Also, what happens with me has happened again. The final scene for this chapter became long enough for a chapter in and of itself so I divided it in two. I’ll still post that part as planned on Sunday, so consider this an extended teaser. 
> 
> Thank you for all the wonderful comments and kudos for the first two chapters! I'm really enamored by this unexpected AU. I hope everyone enjoys this part, a prelude to their first serious conversation.

And If I Call For You  
Part Three

 

Opening the front door to his house, Bucky blocks seventy-pounds of frenzied, hyperactive dog before he can knock over Darcy.

“Christ Jesus, let her come in first. Dumbass dog.”

Marlowe just squirms in response, the prospect of a visitor overwhelming any criticism he hears in Bucky’s voice. The coast presently clear, Darcy eases into the house, and Marlowe shifts into overdrive. He barks and his tail whips back and forth hard enough to take someone’s eye out. The reaction pricks at Bucky, proof that Marlowe recognizes Darcy, that he’d missed her, his reaction to others joyous but not quite reaching this level of ardor. Bucky blocks another bum rush and blames the accidental clawing he receives for the sharpness of his voice, rather than his currently seesawing emotions.

“Marlowe. Sit.”

He does. His tail still swishes at an epic speed, but it’s contained, enough for Darcy to make her approach. She reaches out to pat him on the head. Her fingers curl around his right ear and she digs into his scritch spot, making Marlowe nearly melt into the floor in response. His tongue lolls and he gazes at Darcy in blanket adulation, and this sight too pricks at Bucky, compelling him to turn, to lock the front door and doff his coat before making his way into the living room. 

He’s not far enough away, though, to miss her whispered, “I missed you, too, bud.”

Bucky clears his throat and shifts in place. He doesn’t dare turn back around, not until he feels more like a pillar and less like a pendulum. “There’s, uh, clean towels in the bathroom. Which is still, um, in the same place. Obviously. Or you could eat first. Ma gave me some leftover pasta. You can have some if you want. Or just ice cream. Or you know, whatever.”

He closes his eyes at the word vomit. Darcy says nothing behind him, but he feels her gaze upon him. The weight of it compels him to move, to open his eyes and shift it off. He busies himself with straightening the stuff on the closest end table, a couple of books and a few CDs, before moving to the coffee table and the magazines and his iPod and the mostly full bottle of beer that he abandoned when he left for the mall. There’s a blanket thrown over the back of the couch that could be folded and Marlowe’s leash tangled on the other end table and a pair of his running shoes in a pile by the coffee table, but still Darcy hasn’t said anything, and the discomfort that likely underlies her silence outweighs the unease driving his avoidance, so he turns and faces Darcy.

She still stands by Marlowe, one hand idly scratching his head. Her eyes, though, are on Bucky, fixed and frowning as she says, “Are you sure—”

“I’m sure.” At her continued frown, he says, “I am. I’m just… I’m trying—” He stops then and a rueful smile twists his lips. “I’m trying.”

Darcy continues to eye him. As before, in the alley, he can’t read her expression. He blames Bobbi for that, for schooling her in “super secret spy shit” as Darcy once said, Bobbi former FBI. But the inscrutability vanishes a moment later as a smile blooms across her face, impervious to her deepening bruise. 

“Look at us,” she says. “Trying to be all mature and shit. Steve would be so proud.” 

Bucky laughs. He lifts a hand and rubs it across the back of his neck. “Yeah, he would.”

They stare at each other, and as they do, Bucky knows that he’s doomed. He should have called Sharon to pick Darcy up. Or Steve. He shouldn’t have brought her here, not when she stated once more how she’s no longer his concern, not when the first thing that he did when he touched her again is to caress her, not when his heart thumps like Marlowe’s tail across the floor as he looks at her now, and not when six years have passed since they broke up, three since she slipped out of his bed to marry another, and nearly one since she left Bucky a second time, chafing under his overprotection, and nothing, nothing, _nothing_ has changed, not for him, Bucky as in love with her as he had been the first time they met, Bucky sixteen and Darcy fourteen and she leaning against Peggy’s beat up Honda outside of school, iPod in hand and belting out “Back in Black” at the top of her lungs. 

Her brow creases as she looks at him, as his goddamn face displays the tragic turmoil in his heart in crystal clear Technicolor. Bucky averts his gaze. His hand trembles as he lowers it from the back of his neck. He shoves it and his other one into the pockets of his jeans, scuffs his boot over the already scuffed wood floor, and racks his brain for something to say, for some way to paper over his emotional faux pas. 

As before, in the car, Darcy does it for him.

“I think I’ll shower first. I feel kind of gross. Like parking lot and perp sweat.” 

Bucky nods, grateful for the distraction, for the relief of action, for being able to do something than just stand there, pried open and vulnerable to her inquisitive gaze. “I’ll get you something to sleep in. Put it in the guest room for you.”

Darcy nods too. Bucky eases past, not really avoiding her gaze but not actively meeting it either. Marlowe cottons on to the change in locale and charges up the stairs. Bucky pats him on the head when he reaches the top then turns to the left and heads to his bedroom. He hears Darcy enter the bathroom. As soon as she closes the door behind her, he sags, lifting his hands and covering his face. Only his sister Becca and Steve rivaled Darcy in her ability to affect him. Bucky sucks in a deep breath, seeking an even keel, needing it if he intended to survive the night with his sanity intact. 

Marlowe pads in then. Bucky lowers his hands and crouches beside his dog, drawing comfort as he always has from Marlowe’s warm presence, from the soft, steady love he exudes. He burrows into Bucky, circling around until he stands in prime position, his butt within easy reach for pets. Chuckling, Bucky reaches out and hits the sweet spot above his tail, making Marlowe squirm in ecstasy. The contentment continues until the shower starts. Marlowe straightens, his head cocked to take in the sound.

“You hear that? That’s Darcy. You remember her, don’t you? Yeah,” he says, giving Marlowe a few last pets, “she’s kind of hard to forget.”

As if in response, Marlowe trots away, out into the hall to sit by the bathroom door. Standing, Bucky peers after him. The sight makes him sigh, for the impossibility of this being a regular occurrence for Marlowe, or for him, ever again.

Turning, Bucky crosses to his dresser. As he reaches for the first drawer, his eyes catch on one of the photographs spanning the surface, an old Polaroid of him and Darcy from a camera she dug up at some garage sale before he left for Basic. She’d said that he needed a few old fashioned pics to keep him company overseas. The more risqué ones he still has in a box in his closet. This, one of them together, a Polaroid selfie she’d called it, lies propped against one of him and Steve when Steve made Sergeant and another of him and his folks at his high school graduation. He stares at her smile, at his too, both big and bold and bright, if a little blurry, and his jaw clenches. Reaching out, he yanks open the drawer, only to stop again, the shirt on top a goddamn Army tee like the one she had to wear in the pictures, and the thought of her in it now, the longing that the image stirs, threatens to overturn him again.

His phone chirps before he does something stupid, before he plops down next to Marlowe to wait for Darcy, before he rips his hair out and runs screaming from his house, before he unearths the bottle of scotch in his cupboard downstairs and downs the whole lot. Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out his phone and answers, not needing to look at the caller ID to know who’s calling.

“She’s here, Steve.”

There’s silence on the other end as Steve processes. Then he says, his voice quiet, “Is that a good thing?”

Bucky releases another sigh. He shuffles back from the dresser and flops onto his bed, closing his eyes as he does. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Do you want it to be?”

Bucky opens his eyes. He lifts his free hand and draws it through his hair, everything within him on edge, hyperaware of the shower and the bathroom and Darcy within it. “Maybe,” he says after a moment. “But it doesn’t matter,” he continues, letting his hand fall back onto the mattress. “I’m pretty sure she still hates me.”

“Darcy doesn’t hate you, Bucky. She’s never hated you.”

“Oh no, she did. Intensely. You know that’s why she left town.”

“I think she was more hurt than anything. But,” he continues, “even if she did hate you, that was six years ago. She hasn’t recently. And she doesn’t now.”

The last three words echo and re-echo in his head. Bucky shakes them off, refusing to latch onto this bit of hope. He’s been down the road of hope twice before. Like punching Barton, he’s not sure he can endure a third crash and burn. “Not hating’s not really the basis for anything, Steve, much less a relationship. So it’s… whatever. I don’t know.” He sits then and rubs his hand across his face. “She’s okay, and I put out a fresh APB on Chesterson, and that’s all that matters.”

“It’s not. It isn’t,” Steve says again, overriding his protest. “I like Darcy. I really do. She’s family now, but she’s not blameless in all that’s happened between you two. And I don’t— You don’t deserve to be hurt again.”

“Don’t worry,” Bucky says as he climbs to his feet. “She’s fresh out of interns to marry.”

There’s a half second of silence and then Steve sighs. “Buck—”

“I’ve got to go, get things ready here.”

Steve says nothing. His silence speaks for him though, voicing his protest at the evasion. But he doesn’t push, another reason, as if Bucky needed another, for why Steve is the best man that he’s ever known. “Call if you need to talk. Anytime.” 

Bucky makes a noncommittal noise as he moves back to the dresser.

“I’m serious, Buck—”

“I know you are. I know, okay? I—” He bites back his anger, swelling from the depths of the war and the lingering grip of the trauma upon him. No matter the years and the milestones, therapy and his promotion, buying his house and finishing his degree, even falling in love as much as he could with Jemma, the shadow hovered perpetually over his head, waiting for the wrong moment to drop. Expelling a long breath, he starts again. “This isn’t— I’m not how I was. I’m better now.”

“You are. You’ve come so far, Bucky. You’re in a good place now, and I don’t want that to fall apart for you.”

“It won’t. I don’t want it to, and I don’t think Darcy would either.”

“Oh, so you agree now that she doesn’t hate you?”

Bucky smiles at the bit of humor in Steve’s voice. “Maybe. Tell Peggy I said hello, okay, and give the munchkin a kiss for me. I got a new toy for her, a little bear, that I’ll drop off in the next couple of days.”

“You spoil her.”

Bucky snorts. “Like you don’t. I’ve seen Sarah’s closet, man. Not all that shit came from me.”

Steve laughs at that. “No, it didn’t. Bring the bear. She’ll love it. Good luck tonight, and call me if you need to talk.”

“I will. Thanks.”

Bucky ends the call. He tosses his phone onto the dresser then peers down into the drawer again. The shower still runs, few things better to bruised and battered muscles than streaming hot water. And he means to select a shirt, to pull out a pair of sweatpants and thick woolen socks, Darcy’s feet perpetually cold, but he can’t, ‘She doesn’t now’ running through his head like Sarah on a sugar high. Maybe she didn’t hate him. She did come here, after all. Aside from Sif and Thor, she offered thin reasons for dismissing the other options. She could sleep on Sharon’s couch and thus avoid her snoring, and a visit from Aunt Dee would make Sarah’s day. Had she wanted to come here? Bucky frowns at the notion as he snatches a plain blue tee from the drawer. The idea still didn’t sit well with him given her responses to him showing up during and after her two run-ins with Chesterson. Maybe she didn’t want to come, but at least it seemed she wasn’t outright _opposed_ to coming, which was better than the former and better than her walking away. Bucky would take the progress, and maybe, maybe someday—

He stills the thought before it forms. Maybe someday, but someday was not today and, despite what Steve said, today is what matters, so he closes one drawer and opens another to rummage for clothes for Darcy.

*


	4. Part Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A night at Bucky's, part one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some angst ahead. Also some cursing. 
> 
> Thank you for all the lovely comments on the first few parts! I really appreciate them and have been trying my best to reply in a timely manner. I hope everyone enjoys this part!

And If I Call For You  
Part Four

 

Bucky may have bypassed his bottle of scotch, but he does finish his open beer while waiting for Darcy to finish in the shower. He considers a second one, his mind still jittery, but likely Darcy would want one too and the last thing he needs is _drunk_ jittery nerves, courtesy of three beers on an empty stomach, so he contents himself with water as he plops himself before the TV and the ball game once again to wait. 

He hears Marlowe before he hears Darcy, the beast barreling down the stairs and nearly colliding with the front door when he reaches the bottom. Bucky stands and turns, Darcy following at a more sedate pace, slow enough for him to try to prep himself for the sight of her in his clothes, for seeing her out of her armor of jacket, boots, and lipstick for the first time in nine months. And she is when she rounds the corner, her hair wet and feet bare, her face clean and glasses on, and his breath catches in his chest at the sight, but Bucky thinks he keeps his expression neutral until he meets her eyes and realizes that hers _isn’t_ , that a frisson of nerves tightens her mouth and furrows her brow as she looks at him. She ducks her head and he watches for a moment as her fingers twist the hem of his shirt, and then sense reclaims his brain and he tries to do for her what she did earlier for him.

To not make it worse.

“You hungry?” he asks, pointing to the kitchen. “I can heat us up something.” 

Darcy nods, relaxing a little. They head to the kitchen where Bucky pulls his plate of pasta from the fridge along with the remainder in the Tupperware container. Marlowe wanders in as Darcy claims a stool surrounding the island counter. He sits between them, his eyes fixed on the food. Grabbing a plate, Bucky empties the container onto it and shoves the lot into the microwave.

“You want a beer?” he asks, returning to the fridge.

“God, yes. This day has sucked.”

No sooner has the comment left her mouth than he hears a sharp intake of breath. Bucky glances at her, finds her eyes wide and locked on him. “I didn’t— I meant— You weren’t the suck.”

One corner of his mouth quirks up as Darcy splutters out her clarification. When she sees his smile, her eyes narrow but her lips tick up too. Bucky reaches into the fridge then and pulls out two beers, twisting off their caps and handing one to Darcy. She takes a drink, and he watches, his smile growing, as her shoulders slump and she sighs.

“Jesus,” she mutters, “I can’t remember the last time I had good beer.”

Bucky takes a pull from his. “I can’t remember the last time someone said I drank good beer.”

“Well, you do. At least compared to the shit my tightest of tight budgets makes me drink.”

He wants to ask how bad her situation is, this the second reference that she’s made to him about money trouble. He wants to offer her the money that she needs. A wild part of him wants to ask her to move into his spare room, to stay there, rent free, for as long as she needs. Darcy shifts on the stool. Her eyes dart to him and then away, and she rubs a thumb against the label of her beer bottle. Bucky stifles all the impulses, taking a drink instead and giving her the opportunity to steer their conversation where she willed. She lasts a few more moments before she sets her beer onto the counter and looks at him again.

“Can I ask you what Skye meant? Not to yell at you. I don’t want to fight. Like, at all. I’m tired and I’m sore and I just want to drink beer, eat food, and sleep for about eighteen hours. But you said that you’d explain, and it is about me, so I’m, you know, curious.”

“You? Curious?” Bucky cocks a brow. “Never.”

Darcy gives him a look. Bucky just smiles, lifting his bottle for another sip of beer. She rolls her eyes, but relaxes more, and he does too, her feared response of anger to her inquiry not coming to pass. There’s still time for _her_ anger to his explanation though, so Bucky hesitates, glancing at his bottle.

A few seconds pass before she speaks again. “You know, you’re really doing yourself a favor by telling me.” 

Bucky looks back at her. “Am I?”

Darcy nods. 

“And how is that?”

“Well,” she begins, leaning forward as though they were confidantes, as though she were filling him in on a magnificently juicy secret. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll be forced to go to someone else for answers. Someone who knows you but who also knows the squad and who would thus know what’s going on. Someone tall and blond and practically perfect in every way. Every way, that is, except for one.”

Bucky leans back against the counter, loosening beneath the brightness in her eyes. “And what way is that?”

“An unfortunate susceptibility to me bugging the shit out of him. And do you know who our tall, blond, and noble egg will _blame_ for me bugging the shit out of him until he cracks and spills all your tiny cop secrets?” 

“You?”

Darcy shakes her head. She lifts a starry finger and, smiling, swirls it in his direction. “You know this to be true, dude. The only question is exactly how long Steve will bitch at you for me being unleashed upon him. So, really, you’re doing yourself a favor by telling me.”

Bucky can’t help but smile at her. “Well, when you put it like _that_ , how can I refuse?”

“You can’t.”

He couldn’t and he knew it, but he liked this, this lightness they currently had between them. The prospect of destroying it makes him hesitate. His smile fades and he shuffles in place then the microwave beeps, sparing him another minute or so. Turning, Bucky grabs the plate and a clean fork and sets both before Darcy then he slides his own plate into the microwave and sets the time to reheat. Behind him, he hears Darcy moan, a long, lush sound that makes his traitorous dick twitch in interest.

“Good god, this is good. Your mom is the _best_.”

His smile returns as he grabs a clean fork. “I’ll tell her you said that.”

“Pretty sure she already knows. I think I pledged my undying love to her and her cooking when I was fifteen.” 

“You did,” Bucky says as he turns back around. “She’s still got the certificate you made for her and everything.”

Darcy freezes, her fork laden with food and poised midair. “She does?”

Evade one disaster only to fall face first into the next. Bucky hesitates a moment, casting around for any way to extricate them from this mess he’s made. Finding none, he nods. Darcy lowers her fork to her plate. Her gaze skitters away from him and she tries to smile, she tries to shrug off the heaviness that’s settled upon them, but the smile falters and fades, twisting into something that wrenches at him.

“I thought she would have burned it all,” she says quietly, not quite looking at him. “Or made a little Darcy doll to, you know, jab pins into or something.”

Steve’s comment about blame rears in Bucky’s mind and his hands clench around his bottle. “If she did, she’d have to make one for me too.”

Her eyes fly up to his. Bucky tries, as she did, to smile, but it wavers beneath the weight of what they have lost and why, withering altogether when Darcy drops her gaze again. She stares down at her plate and fiddles with her fork before drawing in a deep breath that hitches in her chest halfway through. The sound echoes in the room, or maybe just in his brain, pulling along with it a dozen different pleas and apologies and lamentations that push at Bucky and demand to be spoken. The ding of the microwave saves him then as it did before from saying something they would both regret.

“You, uh, you want to eat in the living room?” he asks, clearing his throat. “It would probably be more comfortable there. Your ribs and all.”

There’s a few seconds of silence and then Darcy says, “Sure.”

They load up on plates and forks and bottles and, not looking at each other, shuffle into the living room. They sit at opposite ends of the couch and begin to eat, looking at the TV, at the ball game now in its eighth inning, or down at their plates, but not at each other. The silence between them persists for twenty seconds before Marlowe bounds into the room, his tags jingling, his breath huffing as he hops onto the couch between them. He circles around a few times, whacking Bucky on the shoulder with his tail and nearly catching Darcy in the face before actually smacking Bucky in the face as he makes another round. Darcy snorts at that. Bucky turns toward her, only to get a second face full of dog tail as her laughter inspires Marlowe to similar mirth. Cursing, Bucky tries to twist away, but he twists so far that he almost upends his pasta. He has to chase it to keep it steady, which makes Marlowe try to chase it too, which makes Bucky stumble off the couch and bang his knee against his coffee table. He nearly trips over Marlowe as the two spin around, Bucky in pain and Marlowe in food ecstasy.

“Fuck. _Fuck_. Sit. Shit, _sit_ , Marlowe, fucking hell.”

Marlowe does, plopping his ass right onto Bucky’s running shoes. Bucky closes his eyes, trying to restrain the urge to shove pasta up his dog’s nose, when the sound of Darcy wheezing catches his attention. Opening his eyes, he sees her head turned away from him, one hand to her face as she attempts to stifle her laughter. The sight makes him smile, despite the pain radiating from his knee, the abyss, perhaps, once more avoided. Darcy turns and looks at him before he can school his features into something more detached though, and she freezes when their eyes meet. The crack of a bat sounds from the TV. Her laughter wanes, as does her smile, but the expected glare fails to follow. Instead Darcy flushes and jerks her head away, down to her plate. Bucky looks away too, at Marlowe, at the batter rounding third for home, and, again, at Darcy, his thoughts roiling in his head as to why she flushed. When he looks at her again, he finds her still staring at her plate, shoving pasta into her mouth with a single-minded focus that would put Marlowe to shame. The need to know still burns within him, and ‘She doesn’t now’ resumes its march through his brain, but Bucky follows her lead, returning to the couch without comment.

“Uh-uh,” he says as Marlowe darts for the open space. “You go lay down.” He jerks his chin at Marlowe’s bed beneath the window facing the front of the house.

Marlowe stops, inches from the couch. His mouth closes and his tail droops. He stares at Bucky, his most plaintive expression in place, but Bucky just shakes his head. Marlowe persists a second longer before shifting his gaze and his plea to Darcy. 

She smiles at him but shakes her head too. “Sorry, bud. Not gonna happen. He’s got the keys to the ice cream kingdom, so I must obey.”

Marlowe huffs out a sigh. He casts Bucky one more look, a reproachful glare that makes Bucky roll his eyes, before slinking away. He flops down onto his bed, facing not them but the wall in a petulant gesture that sets Darcy to laughing again. 

“Oh my god. I forgot how much of a diva he can be.”

“You want a reminder? You can take him, let him chew up your shoes and snore in your ear and shed dog fur on every piece of clothing you own.”

Darcy glances at him, smiling. “If I didn’t live in a place the size of postage stamp, I would have dognapped him nine months ago. Marlowe’s the best, man, and you know it.” 

Bucky looks at her and then at Marlowe and tries not to smile. “He’s the best all right. The best at drooling.”

“And you,” she says, tilting her head toward him, “are still the best at evading conversations that you don’t want to have.”

He eyes her and tries now not to grimace. “Oh. That.”

“Yes. That.” 

Bucky straightens. A commercial for fast food blares from the TV. He hadn’t been evading, not exactly, but he wants to now. Licking his lips, he picks up his fork and twirls it around only to set it back down with a sigh.

“You said—”

“I know what I said. I’m not—” He presses his lips together, biting back the admission. He’s not evading. He’s stalling, this skewing too close to why she left nine months ago and Bucky afraid that it will push her from him for good. He pulls in a deep breath and considers a fortifying pull from his beer as well, but all he does is lifts a hand to the back of his neck and begin.

“It wasn’t intentional. No matter what Skye said. I didn’t _order_ anybody. It just happened when you started up with Barton again. I was… Fuck, I was worried, so I’d check in with the courts to see what FTAs they had, to see what, you know, Barton might give you. And Peggy found out because she knows everything, and she told Steve, and then Trip found out somehow, and when he did, he told Skye and then she told _everyone_ because she’s got a big goddamn mouth, and then it just became a _thing_ that if you had any run-ins with the PD or a perp, people would call me. And I tried to stop it, but you know how it is. Everyone thinks they know what’s best for everybody else. And yes,” he says, chancing a glance at her, “I am aware of the irony, so let’s just slide on by that conversation, okay?”

Darcy says nothing. She just blinks at him, processing his stilted explanation. Bucky turns away. He lowers his hand and lifts his fork again, stabbing it into his pasta. He shoves some into his mouth and chews with an angry vigor that would put Marlowe to shame. The game returns, but she draws his focus away from it and his thoughts of doom when she speaks.

“But… you never came. Not until today.”

Bucky lowers his fork with another sigh. “Darcy, I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. You made your point about me interfering in your life crystal clear when you left. Today was an accident. I didn’t know it was you.”

“But you did tonight.”

He nods, his mouth tight. Below the window, Marlowe snuffles. He flops onto his side, his ire at Bucky and Darcy for their food refusal already forgotten. If only human indignation faded so quickly. The last six years of his life would have gone very differently if they had. Bucky lifts his fork and scrapes more pasta onto it, but the thought of eating it now makes him wince. He wants scotch and loud music, things to smash the silence that stretches between them. But all he has is a ball game that his team’s losing now and a sleeping dog, so he shoves the pasta into his mouth and waits.

“Thank you,” she says eventually, her voice quiet. “For telling me.” 

Bucky jerks his head toward her. Darcy sends him a soft smile before turning back to her pasta. He waits, but she says nothing more. She eats and takes a drink of her beer and watches the TV, but she still says nothing else, so he does.

“That’s it?” 

Darcy nods.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, if that’s it. _Is_ that it?” she asks, frowning at him. “You didn’t have a squad car drive by my place, did you? Or get someone to follow me around?”

“What? No.”

“Then okay.”

He gapes at her. She rolls her eyes now, but he sees no irritation in the gesture, only exasperation and something that might be fondness. 

“Why would I be mad?” she asks, shrugging at the thought. “You didn’t ask anyone to do it. And you didn’t stop Clint from giving me the FTAs. You were concerned. You can be.”

“What?”

The word comes out in a strangled squeak. Laying her fork down, Darcy turns toward him, and now Bucky sees the fondness, her expression soft and a shade amused as she looks at him. “You can be,” she says again. “You think I never asked people about you?”

“ _What_?”

No strangled squeak this time. Just a blurted cry that makes Darcy look away. She stares down at her plate and twists the fork in her hand. “You, uh, didn’t know?” she asks after a moment.

Bucky shakes his head. 

Silence falls again. Darcy starts to squirm the longer it persists and the longer Bucky stares. As before, in the car, he knows that he stares, but he can’t stop himself, this too unexpected. He sees a flush rise from beneath the collar of his t-shirt and creep up her neck. When it reaches her face, she says without looking at him, “It wasn’t a lot. I just—” She tries again for casual, striving for a shrug like the one she gave before her shower, but the movement’s jerky, her body too tense. “You know me. I can’t keep my nose out of other people’s business. Even when I should.”

Bucky blinks at her, unable to formulate any reply.

Her lips thin. Darcy eyes him, and Bucky can see her discomfort begin to give way to irritation. “Look,” she says, “it’s not fair, you getting mad at me about this, not with what you just told me three seconds ago.”

Bucky frowns at her. “I’m not mad.”

She scoffs at the denial.

“I’m _not_.”

“Then what is this?” she asks as she waves a hand at him. “The silence and the bug-eyed staring. What is it, if you’re not pissed at me?”

Only then does the pitfall become clear. Bucky turns away from it and from her. He closes his mouth and stares at nothing as he racks his brain for an explanation that was better than the truth, than his belief that Darcy didn’t care enough to know about him, that she didn’t care about _him_ , that he thought she hated him and had for years, truth that he knows now would hurt her because of how untrue it is.

He starts as she slams her fork down onto her plate. “Fine. Be mad. Be a goddamn hypocrite too while you’re at it. Just don’t expect me to sit here so you can yell at me.”

She starts to stand. Bucky reaches out and grabs her arm. “I’m not mad!”

Darcy jerks her arm from him. “Don’t lie—”

“I’m not lying! Jesus Christ, I’m surprised, okay? I thought you hated me, and now here you are, saying you’ve been asking about me, like you do care. And I just— _Fuck_.” He retracts his arm then and turns away, plopping his plate on the end table. Hunching over, Bucky props his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands. His heart pounds and his breath comes fast, in shallow pants that do nothing to calm him down. He closes his eyes and tries to breathe in deep, but composure eludes his grasp, his nerves too fried from another argument with Darcy. 

He hears a soft gasp and looks up to see Darcy staring at him, her face growing splotchy and her expression wavering. He’s reaching for her before he can contemplate the wisdom of the gesture, but she evades his grasp, pulling back to stand from the couch.

“Thanks for the pasta.” 

The quiver in her voice wrecks him, makes him try to reach for her again. “Darcy—”

“And for the ride,” she continues, sidestepping him again. She keeps her gaze on the floor as she eases past. “I think I’ll go to bed now. It’s been, uh, it’s been a long day.”

Bucky opens his mouth but she walks away, into the kitchen where she scrapes her pasta into the trash. Marlowe stirs at the sound and follows her, the hope of food driving him, but the hitch of breath that Bucky hears pins him in place. If she didn’t hate him before, she did now. Anything he could say would just make it worse, so he slumps back against the couch and rubs a hand over his face. So much for mature. They couldn’t even go ten minutes before unleashing on each other. They’d never— but he ends the thought before it blooms any further, before it blooms into something stupid, into something hopeful, hope a cold hotel bed in the cool morning light and the ping of a key on the countertop as she walked away. 

Water starts in the kitchen then, Darcy rinsing off her fork and plate. The sound is almost enough to muffle her crying. But almost isn’t and he hears it, paralyzed on the couch, he hears it, the water continuing to run, then he’s up and moving, needing to do something, something more than sit and stare at tasteful beige paneling and a closed front door, to try to salvage what he can.

He finds her standing before the sink, her hands gripping the edge and her head bowed. Marlowe sits beside her, his head tilted up and resting on her leg. They bought him for this, his sensitivity to moods, Bucky unable to articulate what he felt or needed upon his return from the war. He has to look away, his control unraveling at the sight and its implication. Swallowing hard, he counts to ten and then to twenty and then he pulls in a steadying breath before saying loud enough to be heard, “I’m sorry.”

She tenses as he speaks. Her hands clench around the counter, but the break comes unexpectedly, not in flight or in rage but in laughter. Darcy collapses beneath the strength of it, first folding on top of the sink. Her hair disappears into the basin, slithering out as her legs give and she oozes down the side of the cabinet to the ground beside Marlowe, who licks the top of her head. Bucky watches, his eyes wide, as she flops onto her back, groaning as she does, then laughing through the groan, then crying through the laugh, and he thinks she might be going insane.

“This… has been the worst fucking day,” she says as she pulls her glasses off and rubs her hands over her face. “Jesus Christ.” 

“I have scotch,” he says, moving closer. “If that helps.”

Darcy peers at him through her fingers, contemplating the offer. He tasted scotch on her lips the night of the wedding, scotch and sugar from the cake. She swallows as Bucky crouches by her feet, and he can’t help but wonder if she remembers that too, the scotch and the cake and, before, the dancing, how each revolution pulled them closer together, like waves to the shore, the two so distant at the start, two days of formalities and polite conversation broken when he glanced at her during his best man speech and caught her smile, which led to the cake, which led to the scotch, which led to a dance which led to another and then to more, to the hall and the elevator and his room, the closest, but he doesn’t ask, Darcy looking away from him as she shakes her head. 

“Thanks, but no. I’m already going to feel like shit tomorrow. I don’t need to be hungover too.”

He nods as she sits. “What about the ice cream? I’ve got mint chocolate chip.”

His offer earns him a flicker of a smile. Darcy leans back against the cabinet and pushes her hair from her face. She considers him as she does, frank in her assessment. He resists reading into the emotions that slant her brows and compress her lips, too afraid that he’d see just what he wanted to see, her expression his own personal Rorschach. 

Or he tries, the red tinge to her eyes compelling him to speak. “I didn’t mean it how it sounded.”

Darcy arches a brow, but her lips curve into a smile at the same time. “Yeah, you did. You didn’t have to apologize though. I asked you to tell me.”

“Still—”

Darcy shakes her head, and Bucky stops his second apology. She’s no longer looking at him, but at Marlowe. Bucky rises as she eases to her feet, and they stand in silence a moment before her eyes flit back to him. “I should go to bed,” she says, sending him a small smile. “Bring the day to an end before I find another way to fuck it up. But thanks for the offer,” she adds as she starts to move past him. “I appreciate it.”

Bucky nods. He wants to say ‘you’re welcome’ and ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘don’t leave again,’ but his throat seizes and his chest tightens and he struggles simply to breathe. He hears her soft tread diminish as she makes her way to the door. Marlowe pads up to him then, sitting down next to Bucky, but he doesn’t look at Bucky. He stares at the door. Bucky doesn’t. He stares at nothing, his eyes drifting over the sink and the counter, to the stove and the window, as he waits for her tread on the stairs, but it never comes, and he wonders if she’s stopped for her beer or for a book or a magazine, or maybe she’s slipped out the door somehow, conjuring shoes and a car to make her escape from him again. 

Then he hears a soft intake of breath, and he stiffens, aware of her presence now, of the heat of her gaze still upon him, conjuring a small shiver as she says, “I don’t hate you. I never have.” 

Bucky spins around, but she’s already disappeared through the door. He moves then, stopping in the threshold as she turns for the stairs. He waits to watch her ascend, but she doesn’t. Her hand hovers, poised, over the railing instead. Then she glances at him, and he tastes sugar and scotch in her gaze, he sees red heart frames and a faded Army tee, he hears the thrum of “Back in Black,” of cat’s eyes and nine lives, and he wonders as her fingertips trail dark and starry across the beam when she starts up the stairs, he hopes as she goes but doesn’t she walk away.

*


	5. Part Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The conversation continues.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A night terror is described in this part. If you don’t know what it is, it’s kind of a panic attack crossed with a nightmare (I stress the kind of part). I tried my best to capture it accurately. 
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who's supported this story so far! I hope you like this part. It runs the gamut of emotions. I'm posting it a day early because tonight was irritating for me and perhaps it was for others, and fanfic helps make days better. I'm not sure if I can get the last part done by next Sunday. I have it planned but not written out, and my writing time has now dropped down. But if not by next Sunday then hopefully the one after that.

And If I Call For You  
Part Five

 

As Bucky lies in bed, time burns into his brain. He watches the minutes trickle by on his alarm clock. The neon numbers sear his vision, each green hour overlaid on the last, eight to nine, nine to ten, ten to eleven, seconds and minutes and hours passing yet still he’s awake, his thoughts ceaselessly churning. He considered calling Steve at hour one and considered the scotch at hour two, but he discarded both ideas, instead following Darcy’s lead of ending the day early to avoid further catastrophes. But his brain refuses to cooperate, ping-ponging instead between how Darcy didn’t call him but how she did come home with him, to how she cried because of him but how she also laughed because of him, to how she looked at him in the alley and how she looked at him in the car and how she looked at him on the stairs, hovering there. 

He hovers there now, replaying her final words to him in the kitchen. She didn’t hate him. So did she like him then? Or was she indifferent? Not hating was not liking, but it also wasn’t hating so maybe then— 

Sighing, Bucky turns and punches at his pillow. No maybes. Just nows. And now she may have come home with him but she also didn’t call him, and now he may have made her laugh but he also made her cry, and now on the stairs she may have looked at him with something less than hatred but in the alley she looked at him with something less than liking and she only looked at him half of the time in the car, and half of something was also half of nothing and that wasn’t something at all, not something to hang his— 

Scratching from the hall pulls Bucky from his thoughts. Sighing again, he tilts his head toward the door and calls out, “Marlowe. _Stop_.” 

Marlowe does, but only for a few seconds. Then he starts up again, louder now. Suppressing a third sigh, Bucky heaves himself up from his bed and pads out into the hall, already glaring at Marlowe before he even lays eyes on him. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” he hisses, spotting Marlowe before Darcy’s door. “You’re gonna wake her up. Get in here.” 

He points at his room, but Marlowe ignores him, instead letting out a small whine. He leans back to claw at Darcy’s door again. Bucky darts forward to stop him, getting a hand around his collar to guide him back, only to freeze at a sound from inside the room. Frowning, he cocks his head toward the door. The sound emanates again, a faint whimper that has Bucky releasing Marlowe to test the doorknob. Darcy suffered night terrors after her assault from Rumlow. Given the violent nature of her encounters with Chesterson that day, he’s not surprised for her to be having one now. 

The knob thankfully twists under his hand. Blocking Marlowe, Bucky enters the room. He closes the door behind him, which causes Marlowe to whine again, but the sounds fail to reach Darcy, caught as she is in the grip of her nightmare. She thrashes in the bed and lets out another soft cry. Moving forward, the lamp by the bed already on, Bucky sits on the edge of the bed. He reaches out with his right hand to clasp hers and moves his left to her head where he brushes her hair back from her face. 

“Darcy. You’re safe here. No one’s going to hurt you.”

He keeps his voice steady, as soft as he can while still being loud enough to wake her. Darcy twitches as he speaks and inhales sharply. Bucky squeezes her hand; his mouth flattens at the clammy feel of her palm. He brushes his thumb across her forehead then smoothes his hand over her hair.

“Darcy. Darlin’, come on. Wake up.”

She does, suddenly, shooting up so fast she almost head-butts him. He dodges as she gasps. Her hand trembles in his, and she stares, blindly, eyes wide, straight ahead.

“Darcy?”

She jerks her head toward him. She stares through him a moment before her eyes clear and she sucks in a tremulous breath. “Bucky?”

He nods. 

Darcy gazes at him another second then her face twists, her control collapsing beneath the weight of her night terror. She twists away from him as she starts to cry. He watches her curl in a ball on her side and reaches out to rub a hand across her back. He knows from prior experience, both hers and his own after the war, that there’s nothing he can say to help ease her pain. She has to ride the lightning until the storm within abates, until the fear finally relinquishes her and slinks back to the shades in the back of her mind.

Marlowe whines then. “You want me to let him in?” Bucky asks, leaning closer to her.

She nods. Bucky stands and moves to the door. When he opens it, Marlowe darts inside, heading straight for the bed. Darcy turns as he jumps up. She curls into him as he settles, wrapping one arm around his broad body. Marlowe sniffs her hair; he gives her forehead a soft lick. She buries her face in his fur and breathes in, and Bucky feels tears prick his eyes unexpectedly. He blinks a few times and averts his gaze, the picture everything he wants and nothing he can have.

“I’m gonna get you some water,” he says quietly. “You want anything else?”

“Ice cream.”

The pillar he means to be dissolves like salt at the two muffled words. Biting down on his bottom lip, he gives a jerky nod then forces himself to say, as steady as he can, “Coming right up.”

In the kitchen, he grabs the carton of mint chocolate chip from the freezer and two spoons before filling two glasses of water and juggling it all back upstairs. Darcy sits when Bucky comes back in, and he gets a small smile as she spots the ice cream in his hand.

“Ben and Jerry’s,” she murmurs as he sets one of the water glasses on the closest bedside table. “You’re a prince among discount brands.”

Smiling, Bucky hands her the carton. Her eyes go wide as she reaches for it. “Oh my god, it’s the chocolate chunk one, too.” Darcy pries off the lid, and, for a moment, Bucky thinks she’s going to lift the carton to her face and inhale the ice cream like Marlowe does the food from his bowl, but she just brings it closer to inhale the sweet flavor. As she does, some of the tension sloughs off her shoulders. Bucky offers her a spoon, which she grabs with a flourish.

“And now,” she says, “we feast.”

They do, passing the carton back and forth. Marlowe sleeps between them, first laying contained on his belly, then turning onto his side, then, when the carton’s half-empty, rolling onto his back with his paws thrust into the air. Bucky leans forward to rub his belly, stilling halfway there as a yawn seizes hold of him.

“Sorry I woke you,” Darcy says when he stops.

Bucky shrugs. “I wasn’t asleep.” 

“Also because of me.” She snorts, a rueful one that has him glancing back at her. “I’ve brought a barrel of fun into your life tonight, haven’t I?”

“Maybe,” he says, leaning back. “But I seem to remember inviting it. So don’t worry about it.”

She says nothing to his reassurance. Turning toward her, Bucky finds her staring at the carton in her hand, her jaw tight, the bruise standing stark against her skin. Darcy stabs her spoon into the ice cream and swirls it around, but she doesn’t eat the bite; she just releases her spoon with a sigh and a shake of her head before lowering the carton. 

“You want to talk about it?” he asks, reaching for his glass.

“No.”

Bucky arches a brow at the blunt refusal. Darcy sighs again and slumps back against her pillows. She lifts her spoon and stabs again at the ice cream only to release it a second time and close her eyes. Sipping from his water, Bucky waits her out, knowing that she needs time to decide, both if she wants to talk and what she wants to say. 

She does, opening her eyes when he sets his water back on the bedside table. “You were right, okay? About me. You were right.”

Bucky frowns at her. “Okay.”

Darcy eyes him, trying to determine his tone, he imagines, whether he mocks her or admits to genuine confusion. 

Restraining his sigh, he says softly, “Darcy, I don’t—”

“The bounty hunting,” she blurts out, averting her gaze. “I suck at it. I try, I do, but I can’t do it, not even with Clint and Bobbi helping me. So you were right, okay?” She lifts the spoon then and, for the third time, stabs at the ice cream. “Feel free to commence with righteous gloating.”

Now he sighs. “You know I’m not going to do that.”

There’s a half second of silence before Darcy sighs too. She leans her head against the headboard and closes her eyes. Her grip on the carton turns white. Bucky feels the bottom give way beneath them as her chin quivers and she twists her head to the side.

“Darcy—”

“I just don’t know what else to do.” Her voice cracks on the last word. Darcy reaches up with her free hand and covers her face, but the words tumble from her, the first trickle becoming a torrent, an avalanche that wakes Marlowe and harrows Bucky. “It’s not enough. Even with a second job. It’s not— I’m trying, but it’s not. And I don’t know what to do.”

She breaks then and starts to cry. The ice cream nearly falls as Darcy covers her face with both hands. Bucky leans forward and snags the carton, setting it beside his water before turning back toward her. “Darcy. Darcy, don’t cry. It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay. We’ll figure something out.”

“We?” She rips her hands from her face and stares at him, incredulous. “Are you serious?”

Bucky looks away. He feels his face start to heat, and he grits his teeth against it.

“Why would you ever want to help me?” she asks, her voice rising, cresting toward hysteria. “I _left_ you.” 

Bucky jerks his head toward her. He gapes, his eyes wide, as she continues. 

“I left. And I didn’t say anything. I didn’t… answer your calls or— I left and then… Then I—” She stops, her breath hitching in her chest, but Bucky doesn’t need her to continue to know the rest. He’s spent the past three years contemplating this particular disaster, Darcy marrying Ian the Intern, analyzing all the angles, deconstructing the hows and the whys and coming up, every time, blank. 

She swipes a hand over her face now, smearing the tears with a sharp stroke of her hand. “I left,” she says again. “But you were there after Rumlow and you’re here now and I don’t get why. You thought I hated you. Why didn’t you? Why don’t you?”

He gapes a moment, still thrown by this twist in their night, by the elephant in the room suddenly becoming visible. Then sense returns to him once again and he says, “Leaving’s not a reason to hate you. We weren’t together then.”

She cocks a brow. “I don’t know how much more together we could have been.”

“We weren’t,” he counters. “Not in the way that counts. Not like I… Not like I should have been for you.” 

Darcy freezes. Why shouldn’t she, this the bigger elephant of the two, the biggest, the first, the precipice that he shoved them over when he found the pregnancy test in her bathroom. He can’t hold her stare, Bucky seeing Darcy as she is now, bruised and blotchy and mussed from troubled sleep, but also as she was then, young, so young, and terrified, Bucky self-destructing, haunted each night by the torture he endured and the people that he killed and the knowledge that, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much Darcy loved him or Steve supported him or his family cared, Bucky would never, ever be the same.

Marlowe looks between them, unsure who to comfort. Reaching out, Bucky strokes the top of his head, down his neck, and across his back. Marlowe inches closer to him, he places his head on Bucky’s knee, and Bucky looks there, at Marlowe, not at Darcy, to weak to do so, to direct his confession at its proper source. 

“I’m sorry. How I reacted… What I said… You didn’t deserve it. Any of it. I get why you didn’t say anything when you thought you were pregnant. I was barely keeping it together.” He pauses and a rueful smile twists his lips. “No. Not barely. I _wasn’t_ keeping it together. Not remotely.” He shrugs then, but the stiff set of his shoulders belies the attempted indifference of the gesture. “I wasn’t exactly father of the year material.”

“You were traumatized.”

“Maybe. But it didn’t give me reason to say what I said. Or to end things like I did. I just…” He stops, the words stumbling in his throat. He planned them years ago, from the moment Steve told him that Darcy intended to return for the wedding. They falter now, daunted by even more time and even more history, by Ian and Rumlow and Jemma and, most of all, by themselves. But he doubts fate will give him another chance, so pulling in a deep breath, he pushes through. “I know you didn’t mean to, and I don’t— I’m not blaming you. Or I’m trying not to. But hiding it… It was proof of everything that I felt. Proof that I was broken. Because if I wasn’t, you would have told me, you know? But you didn’t. And I— ” His throat swells and tears burn his eyes. Bucky bears down and tries to brace himself against the rush of emotion so he can finish what he started and apologize. She deserved it. “I reacted badly. And I’m sorry for that. And for not telling you sooner. I should have said it years ago. I wanted to, but I didn’t want to make things worse.”

Darcy snorts. “Fat chance of that happening.” She tries to smile as Bucky glances at her, but the smile wobbles and fades to a grimace. Abandoning the pretense, Darcy leans her head against the headboard and releases a soft sigh. “You may have heard, but I haven’t exactly made the best decisions the past few years.”

Bucky tries another shrug. This one thankfully comes smoother than the prior attempt. “You did what you had to do. Bounty hunting’s not—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

The world goes _Vertigo_ , pushing and pulling at him at the same time. Bucky sits very still and he breathes nice and steady and he looks at Darcy but he tries not to stare, the conversation bumping against the blank space in his life, the why of her leaving. Why, if she danced with him. Why, if she kissed him. Why, if she didn’t hate him like she said she didn’t and never had. He wonders if she’s known the truth from the moment that she left or if she’s just figuring it out now, if his disclosure clarified somehow her own murky reasoning. 

“You don’t have to say anything,” he murmurs, drawing his hand over Marlowe’s back again.

“I know. But you did.” One corner of her mouth ticks up into a small smile. “And I’ve heard that heartfelt confessions are a sign of emotionally mature people. Gotta keep up the pretense.” 

“Well,” he says, returning her smile, “when you put it like _that_ …”

“I do. So…” Looking at Bucky, she pulls in a preparatory breath then she drops her gaze and reaches for her water, swallowing half the glass before setting it back down and staring at her hands a moment. Then she, abruptly, begins. “So I left town. After, you know, it ended. And I saw places and I did things. I cut my hair and dyed it. I worked in a grocery store and then at a gas station and then at a bar, a really dive one that I’ve done my best to suppress. And I met Ian and he was, you know, nice. And I thought I’d moved on. I’d moved, so I’d moved on, right? So when Peg asked me to be in the wedding, I said yes. Even though I knew you’d be in it. It was only a couple of days. I could handle it, you know? So I came back.” She pauses then as her gaze goes distant. “And then I saw you.” Her expression softens and a wistful sort of smile appears on her face. Bucky watches, transfixed, at the play of emotions on her face. “Do you remember?” she asks, her voice hazy. “At the church. You rode up on your bike. The second you stepped off it I knew. I knew that you were you again. Healthier, I mean. Happier. And I…” Her smile turns wry and she shakes her head. “I also knew that I’d been lying to myself the whole time I’d been away. Nothing had changed. Not for me. Not about you.”

‘Not about you’ twines with ‘She doesn’t now’ and the two charge through Bucky like Marlowe down the stairs, each syllable in time with the pounding of his heart. He scratches by Marlowe’s ear and focuses on his breathing, striving for calm as he says, “It hadn’t for me either.”

Darcy’s smile widens. “Yeah, I figured that out pretty quickly. You’re not exactly subtle, dude. Heart on your sleeve and all that.” 

The truth of her tease provokes a blush, makes him wonder what she’s seen of him that day and this night. Everything, he chances, and he tries not to let the fact that she came home with him give him hope.

“Which made it worse,” she continues now. Bucky glances up at the comment, in time to see her smile fade. Darcy looks away, not at her hands this time, but off to the side, away from Bucky.

“Why?”

“Because I thought that you still hated me.” She shrugs, a small one, and a tight smile stiffens her face. “I mean, why wouldn’t you? Clint’s not Steve, but you two were friends, and I…” She stops again, pressing her lips together as they start to tremble.

Bucky tenses. He lets his hand slip off Marlowe as the memory of Darcy leaving Clint’s looms in his mind. Six years later, and he still feels the rage that propelled him forward, that set him off on Clint and nearly ended their friendship. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he grits out. “Clint wasn’t with anyone. Neither were you.”

She loses ground against the trembling. “Just because it wasn’t wrong doesn’t mean it was right. Which I’m, like, the queen of doing.” Darcy blows out a breath then and pushes her hands back through her hair. “Because, when we… at the wedding… I was dating Ian. I mean, we weren’t _together_. Not officially. He wanted to be, but I didn’t. And I thought that was just because I was all rebel, rock and roll, live fast, dyed hair, and all that jazz. But it wasn’t, and seeing you made me realize that. I just wasn’t in love with him.”

Darcy glances at him, a soft side glance through her lashes. When she does, the implication sinks in, and when it does, Bucky can’t hold in the question any longer. “Then why did you leave?”

The ground gives way and he sees tears once more fill her eyes. She pulls in a shaky breath and says, her voice soft in the dark, “Because you were better.” 

No _Vertigo_ now. Just a blank stare and the slow dropping of his jaw. “What?”

Darcy squirms as a blush begins to burn across her face. “I was trying to do the right thing.”

Bucky narrows his eyes. “By running off to get married?”

“By _leaving_ ,” she says, her flush deepening. “I was a fucking mess, Bucky. Jesus, I still am. You have a house and you’ve made Sergeant and you’re together and with it, but me? I’m a cocktail waitress at Fandral’s fucking bar, and, when I’m not doing that, I’m giving my mom regular heart attacks by trying to be Boba Fett! You don’t deserve that in your life.” 

Again, Bucky gapes, but only for a moment, only before his hands start to shake and the urge to yell swells within him, before he stems both with gritted teeth and a slow indrawn breath. “What I deserve,” he says slowly, “is not your decision. It’s mine.”

Darcy lifts her chin at him, not giving an inch. “Fine. Then I didn’t deserve it.”

You, she means, Bucky seeing it in her eyes. Lifting his chin, too, he says, “I disagree.”

She gives then, just an inch, shifting her gaze past Bucky to stare at the wall behind him. Her lips quiver again before she ruthlessly mashes them together, and he wants to lean forward, to nudge Marlowe out of the way, and gather her into a hug, this, the small sliver of doubt inside her, this surprise whenever anyone, particularly him, declared her worth, making him ache. His hands twitch in the need to punch. He might, if he ever sees Tony Stark again, for washing his hands of his kid fifteen years ago, for passing off child support and an untouched trust fund as parental support and placing this doubt within Darcy at her ever being wanted. 

“Is that why you left last year?” he asks, calmer now. “To help me?”

Her gaze flits back to him, Darcy probably detecting his diluted anger. She stares a few seconds before shaking her head. “I did it to help me. So I could get my shit together. Or try to. Because then—” 

His stomach swoops at the aborted wish, the restraint so familiar, the caging of hopes, of what ifs, of maybes and possibilities. Bucky considers pressing, of pushing past this blockade they’ve erected between them so maybe they could once more, but he understands her reasoning, her need to feel in control after lacking all sense of it, of someone snatching it from you and leaving blood and bruises in its wake.

“I could have helped you,” he says softly. “I wanted to.”

Darcy shakes her head. The reappearance of tears in her eyes softens the blow. “You didn’t want to _help_. You wanted to _fix_. You wanted me to quit my job and move in here so you could take care of me and keep me safe.” She pauses, swallowing down a bit of the emotion as she looks around the room. “The idea wasn’t completely unappealing. I mean, shit, I’m here now, aren’t I? But I _couldn’t_ ,” she continues, turning back to him. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t depend on you in that way. I don’t have a lot, but at least I can say I’ve made my own way.”

Bucky nods, the truth of her words undeniable, but he also presses, leaning forward a bit to say, “You’re right. I wanted you to stay. And, yes, I do wish that you did something else for a living. I have every goddamn day for the past year.” Darcy glances away at the reference to Rumlow. Bucky ducks down further to catch again her gaze. “But I’m not completely wrong. You can still make your own way and have people help you.” He straightens, Darcy watching him with wary eyes. “You say that I’m together now. That I got better. I didn’t do it alone, Darcy. I had help. A lot of it. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from trying to get my shit together these past six years is that _everybody_ , and I mean everybody, needs help sometimes. And that there’s no shame in receiving it.”

She’s silent, but Bucky sees the shaking of her hands, he hears the breath snag in her throat, so he keeps pressing, this perhaps the only moment where someone might break through.

“It doesn’t have to be me, though I want to. I want to help. You say the word, you know Peggy and Sharon will do whatever they can for you. Or your mom. Or—”

His brain catches up with his good intentions then, and he hesitates before saying the next option. Darcy stares at him a moment before the unspoken clarifies.

“No,” she says, turning away.

“He owes you, Darcy. And not just some fucking trust fund.”

She shakes her head. 

“Darcy—”

“ _No_. He made his choice.”

Stark had, and so had Bucky when he pursued this conversation. “He did,” he concedes. “Fifteen years ago. The man has changed, Darcy.”

Her head jerks back toward him. “How do you—” But she stops before the question fully forms, the answer clear on his face. Darcy narrows her eyes then, and, for a moment, Bucky wishes that he hadn’t pursued this line of thought. “You’ve talked to him.”

He nods.

“When?”

“When you were in the hospital. He stopped by.”

Her jaw drops. “What?”

“Your mom called him. She was worried. And so was he, so he came.”

“I…” She drifts off, at a loss. “He didn’t… No one said anything.”

“No,” Bucky murmurs. “They didn’t.” He momentarily debates whether he should say the next bit. He pushed, farther than he thought he would when he stood from the couch to pick her up at the mall. But as he’s already said multiple dumbass things tonight, what’s the harm in one more?

“Crazy, you know. Not stupid.”

She inhales sharply at the reference, but it’s Bucky who looks away, turning around for his glass of water. He leans back against the headboard as he takes a drink, aware of her gaze still upon him. Bucky stares straight ahead, across the room at the TV, at the sunset painting on the wall done by his sister during college. Why the hell had he brought them into a discussion of her and her dad? Because he was both crazy and stupid, and because, like her dad, Bucky had also cast her from his life, plunging them onto this path of strife and recriminations.

Bucky takes another drink of water then sets the glass back on the table beside him. Twisting around, he pulls in a deep breath and scrounges his brain for something helpful to say, something that could, perhaps, miraculously, paper over the fissures they keep forcing between them. 

Then Darcy speaks.

“Could you…”

Bucky looks at her. As he had before, she stares straight ahead, at the painting on the wall and then at the TV and then her eyes dart to the side to look at him before they return to the painting. She, too, sucks in a deep gulp of air, preparing herself to complete the started sentence. 

“You’re right,” Darcy says after another moment. “I do, you know, possibly, from a certain point of view, that being my own because I’m the dumbass who said it, need some help. So I’m asking you. For that help. And I’d rather it be you than Peggy or Sharon or my mom because you, you know, get it. Or I guess I get how you were before,” she amends, her gaze flitting toward him again. “So if you still wanted to, help, that is, I would be open to… accepting some. And, you know, grateful for it.”

Bucky bites down on the smile that wants to form, the moment fragile, Darcy the deer and Bucky the looming headlights of her interpreted doom. “I do,” he says. “Very much so.”

Darcy arches a brow at him, but he sees the smile hovering at the corners of her mouth. “Hold up there, Papa Theresa. You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.”

He waves a hand at her, encouraging her to proceed.

She draws in another breath. “Okay,” she begins. “As previously expressed and as witnessed by the extreme bruised and battered state of my being, I kind of suck at bounty hunting. _However_ , until I figure out what else I can do that allows me to live the semi-respectable life to which I’ve become accustomed, I must bounty hunt, so…”

Darcy looks at him, her brows raised in anticipation. It only takes Bucky a moment to catch the hopeful drift. 

“You want me to help you catch Chesterson.”

“Yes. Now, I know you hate bounty hunting. Or, at least, me doing it. So I wouldn’t be asking you for this if Thor or Sif were in town. Clint’s still busted up from tracking down the Bro squad a couple of weeks ago, and Bobbi’s got three other cases she’s working on. So you’re the last of my legitimate badge-carrying badasses that I can ask.” 

Bucky lounges back against the headboard. “Oh, so I’m a badass now? Because I distinctly recall someone saying earlier today that she could probably kick my ass.”

Darcy gives him a look. Bucky grins in response, which makes her roll her eyes at him but which also makes a faint splash of pink color her cheeks. “And to think,” she mutters, “I was going to buy you beer and pizza for helping me.”

“You mean the pizza you were already planning to buy when you caught him?”

“Yes,” she says, unrepentant. “Which I was totally going to share with you, something I never do because pizza is one of the most sacred of foodstuffs. Well, you can kiss that goodbye, buddy.”

“A tragedy,” Bucky says, trying not to laugh. “Now I’ll be spared your abominable taste for pineapple.”

“So says the dude who likes mushrooms on his pizza. You have no room to criticize anyone’s taste.” 

“Maybe not,” he murmurs, looking at her. “How about we compromise? Pepperoni, sausage—”

“Extra cheese.”

“—extra cheese and olives.”

Darcy arches a brow. “Green or black?”

Bucky tilts his head at her. “Black.”

She peers at him a moment, her eyes narrowed, before nodding and holding out her hand. Bucky glances at it. Light glints off the glitter covering her nails; raw scrapes, likely from Chesterson knocking her down, redden her palm. Bucky lifts his gaze to her face. Clear eyes stare back at him, marred by a tiny furrow in her brow and the flush from their flirting, he must call it was it was, for it was, he remembers the fit and the feel of it, the words worn but true, the flush from their flirting still highlighting her face. Bucky reaches out and clasps her hand, the first initiated contact he’s had with her in nearly a year. Her palm is cool from the ice cream but no longer clammy, and the soft touch recalls for him dozens of others, from the first, guileless and bold, a dozen years back to those that nearly make him blush now and set his blood rushing through his body to the desperate embraces upon his return and the fevered caresses the night of the wedding and the few after Rumlow when she curled into him as they sat on his couch and cried. Now she grasps his hand in a firm grip, her chin tilted as they shake, but he sees the faint flutter of her lashes and he wonders what she sees as she looks at him, as he strives to steady his breathing, as he licks his lips and pauses, her gaze dipping down then, as he summons a smile and waits for her to once again meet his eyes, as she does and he says, his heart in his throat and also his sleeve, “Looks like you got yourself a deal.”

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why, yes. I've given in to the lure of Tony being Darcy's dad. I've done everything else in this AU, mashing all the characters together like a toddler at play. :D


	6. Part Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky and Darcy the morning after their conversation, preparing to hunt Chesterson.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Darcy quotes Star Wars, references Aladdin and then Sherlock Holmes at the end of the fic. Also, you should know Yoda. Some versions of Greek myths describe Orion as the only man whom the goddess Artemis loved. Bucky references The Inferno (the seventh circle of hell is for violent sinners) then Samus, the main character from Metroid, who is a female bounty hunter. Also, I have no clue how long tazer scars/marks remains. I’ve gone with what works best for comedic value. ☺ 
> 
> Thank you so much for the comments, kudos, and bookmarks for this story. I love this AU so very much and it makes me giddy that others are enjoying it too. There's one more part to go, which I hope to have finished in the next two weeks. The action scene may take a bit longer to plan and write than some of the other parts of the story.

And If I Call For You  
Part Six

Bucky wakes to the smell of bacon and a booming crash from the kitchen. Jerking up, he starts for his sidearm on his bedside table then he hears a rush of footsteps followed a second later by Darcy bellowing from the bottom of the stairs, “Everything’s under control! Situation normal!” There’s a half second pause and then a muttered, “Mostly,” before she rushes back, presumably, to the kitchen.

Heart still racing, Bucky flops back onto the bed. He’d returned to his room shortly after shaking hands with Darcy, and he’d tried, in vain, to sleep. His brain, though, hadn’t cooperated, instead preferring to review the preceding conversation from every conceivable angle, rewinding back to the alley, fast forwarding to dinner, lingering over her revelations and the progress, maybe, they had made. The last time that he remembers glancing at the clock had been about half past three. Twisting his head now, Bucky groans at the time, Darcy up and functioning a little after eight in the morning. Then he remembers why, the smell of bacon reaching him again, and he crawls out of bed to stagger down the stairs. 

A feast covers the island counter, the previously scented bacon along with scrambled eggs and a heaping pile of toast along with the strawberries his ma had given him with the pasta, the berries now washed and sliced. Coffee brews in the pot and orange juice already fills two glasses that sit by two plates encircled by napkins and silverware. Darcy kneels by the sink, where she sprawled the night before in her stress-induced hysteria, cleaning the last bit of suds and water from the floor. Bucky spots a haphazard stack of drying pans beside her, the likely source of the booming crash, and the likely cause of the crash beside them, Marlowe. He ambles up to Bucky then for a morning pet. Dazed, Bucky reaches out to scratch behind his ear. There’s water and the remains of food in his bowls already, and his leash dangles from the handle to the freezer door though Bucky had left it in the living room the day before. Eyes drifting back to Darcy, he watches as she tosses a soggy towel into the sink. Headphones snake down from her ears to the back pocket of her jeans, and she bops along to some music, awake and dressed and here and functioning and chipper and the time still a little after eight in the morning, and Bucky stares at it all, wondering, for a moment, if he’s still in bed dreaming, and then Darcy stands and waves to him and he blurts out eloquently, “What.” 

She laughs and pulls her headphones from her ears. “Not quite what you expected.”

Bucky shakes his head. He shuffles toward the counter and plops down onto one of the stools. “I thought you’d sleep in, eat cake for breakfast.”

“Not with your fridge,” she says, moving toward the coffee pot. “It’s a beautiful thing, dude. So full of food that’s not expired. I couldn’t resist.” She reaches for the pot, but stops halfway there to look back at him. “You don’t mind, do you? I was gonna ask, but I didn’t want to wake you. Plus, I figured you’d be more accepting of a thank-you breakfast that was already made.”

Bucky stills at the last. He eyes the food before him again, the sight different now that he knows she made it for him. “You didn’t have to—”

“I know I didn’t,” Darcy says as she turns back to the coffee. Reaching for the pot, she fills two mugs, dousing one with liberal quantities of sugar. “That’s what makes it a thank you. But if you won’t eat it for that reason,” she continues, turning with both mugs in hand, “then consider it a celebration of us using our words last night and being all mature and shit.” 

She shoots him an easy grin that, grasping the proffered mug, Bucky finds himself matching. “To emotional maturity,” he murmurs, holding up his coffee for a toast. Darcy clinks her mug against his, careful not to let the contents slosh over the rim.

They dig in then, loading their plates. Marlowe plops down between them, first looking at Darcy then at Bucky, his eyes huge and imploring, a whine issuing forth from him with each piece of bacon consumed. Darcy peers down at him and shakes her head. Marlowe squirms in desperate anguish, as though he hadn’t just eaten, as though he’d never eaten before in his life. The sight makes Darcy laugh. She glances up at Bucky and they lock eyes. Her bruise had intensified over the night, the blue purpling, mimicking the shadows beneath her eyes, but brightening the color. Her smile fades and she turns away, back to her plate, but after a moment, he sees her gaze slide toward him again, and he can’t help but smile.

At that, she gives him a look. “What?”

Bucky shakes his head. He reaches for his last piece of bacon and, looking at her, pops it into his mouth. The action earns him a slit-eyed glare, which makes him laugh. 

“What?” he asks. “I can’t enjoy breakfast?”

Darcy eyes him another moment before turning away again. He catches the faint quirk of her lips as she does; the budding smile quickens his breath and kicks his pulse up a notch. He watches as she reaches for her orange juice and takes a prim sip. Then she says, “You can’t. You must scowl and grouse and grumble about my bad life choices. And I must glare and huff and sigh in return. This is our status that must be quo’d. If not, seas will dry, ice will melt, puppies will mourn.”

Bucky lifts his brows. “Puppies?”

Darcy nods, her solemn expression undercut by the smile still playing about her mouth. “Kitties, too. You don’t want to make kittens sad, do you?”

The grin comes breezy and spring bright. “Of course I do. Legitimate, badge-carrying badass here. Making kittens and puppies mourn is my whole reason for being.”

“Well,” she says, her smile stretching languid and summer warm across her face, “when you put it like _that_ …”

“I do.”

She waves an imperious hand at him. “Then by all means, enjoy away.”

“I will.”

They look at each other, smiling, not quite the goofy grins that they shared in the first giddy days of their love. These bear bruises, they bloom tentative and slow, feeling their way through the lingering dark after a long, cold winter. 

Before the moment can buckle beneath the weight of the past or the possibly maybe almost at hand, Bucky grasps his mug and says, “So… what’s on the agenda today?”

Darcy downs the rest of her orange juice before nodding. “First, we breakfast. Then, you badass. Like, full on: jeans, leather jacket, boots, shades. We _will_ be taking your motorcycle, despite its impracticalities in actually transporting criminals after capture. The badass factor of it outweighs the impracticalities, and we need Chesterson to be pissing his pants in fear.”

“Perp pee. Excellent. Just what I wanted on my day off.”

Darcy cocks a brow at his deadpan sass. Bucky grins at her and takes a sip of his coffee. The grin earns him a roll of her eyes but also the return of a hint of a smile. “After that,” she continues, “we’ll stop by my place so I can badass too. My files are also there. We can go over them if you want, but I’m pretty sure I know where he’s going to be today.”

Bucky plucks a strawberry from his plate. “The seventh circle of Hell?”

“Close,” Darcy says, plucking the strawberry that he plucked from his hand. “The mall.”

Bucky frowns at her, first for the fruit then for the disclosure. “The mall? What the fuck’s at the mall that would make him go there again?”

Like a cat before a mouse, Darcy unleashes a slow, evil grin. “Shasta Collins. Word on the street is Chesterdick thinks he’s in _love_ and is trying to convince her to go all Bonnie and Clyde with him.” She rolls her eyes and takes a bite of the berry.

“Do you think she will?”

“Nope.” The evil grin widens. “She’s the one who narced on Chesterson being there yesterday. Hopefully she’ll call me again if he shows today.”

Bucky nods. He swallows the rest of his coffee before standing. “I’m gonna take Marlowe for a quick run before showering. Then we can go.”

Darcy waves a hand at him as she snags his last strawberry. “I got this. Go. Run. Sing to the little birdies as they braid your hair.”

Bucky resists the urge to smooth a hand over said hair. “It’s not _that_ long.”

She arches a brow at him. “Dude, you’re one flannel away from a 90s grunge rocker.”

He arches one back. “So says the woman with the raging crush on Chris Cornell when we were in high school.”

Darcy turns as red as the berry in her hand. Bucky grins at her again, a cheeky one that makes her narrow her eyes at him. He’s possessed by the urge to swoop in and kiss the sugar from her lips, but he restrains himself, instead backing toward the door to the living room. She watches him leave, flushed, her breath coming fast, and he thinks maybe, maybe as he turns away.

*

The open doorway looms before Bucky, he sees the small living room beyond the entryway, all the way back to the eating area that lines the far wall of Darcy’s apartment, but he doesn’t follow her inside. At least not immediately. Nerves root his feet to the muddy polka dot mat before the door. It had been a year since he’d last been there, Bucky accompanying Darcy after her release from the hospital to pick up some of her stuff. Now she grants him entry again. He swallows at the realization, at the memory of her arms wound around him as they rode his bike here, at the feel of her thighs pressed close to his legs and her breasts pressed up against his back. 

“Come on, Aladdin.”

Bucky glances up, finds Darcy staring back at him.

Darcy beckons him inside with a wave of her hand; the other holds Becca’s helmet, borrowed for the ride. “Come into the Cave of Wonders. It won’t bite. Or I won’t,” she amends, sending him a soft smile. 

He flushes at her catching his hesitation. “Not so much worried about it biting as you tazing,” he mutters as he eases inside.

Her eyes widen as she processes the reference, Darcy just sixteen and entirely too enamored by her birthday present from the Colonel: an electric yellow tazer. Bucky had been her first victim, the nodes striking his shin as he stepped through her window and into her room. “Oh my god,” she groans. “That was _ten years_ ago. How long are you going to hold the grudge?”

Bucky closes the door behind him. “As long as the scars remain. Which they still do.”

That quiets some of her righteous indignation. Grimace firmly in place, Darcy squirms for a few seconds before mumbling, “It’s not like I meant to. I thought you were a robber.”

Bucky gives her a look. “A robber? In a Carver High tee?”

“It was dark! I was startled!”

Now he cocks a brow. “Because it was totally unexpected for me to sneak into your bedroom in the middle of the night when I’d been doing it for _two years_ by that point.”

“Yeah, but you were extra sneaky that time. Normally, you made a lot more noise.” 

Bucky looks at her a moment before lifting his foot and kicking his heel against the closed door. The thuds reverberate through the small apartment, making Darcy roll her eyes.

“Smartass.”

He smirks at her. “I thought I was a badass.”

Darcy rolls her eyes again, but he sees the smile that she tries to squash. “You’re an ass all right. Why don’t you put it to some good use while I change?” She turns and points at her small dining table, a repurposed patio set she found her freshman year of college. A smattering of papers and photographs litter the surface. “Don’t drink the tap water if you get thirsty,” she adds as she turns for the short hall to her bedroom. “It tastes like demon farts. I have a filtered pitcher in the fridge. The cups are clean, don’t judge my fridge, I know it’s lame, and bathroom’s second door down the hall.” 

And with that, she’s gone, disappearing down the hall and, a second later, into her bedroom. The click of the door closing reaches Bucky but doesn’t compel him forward. He remains by the front door instead, the breezy tone to their exchange muting beneath his resurgent nerves. Licking his lips, he sets his helmet down by his feet. Music begins to blast through the thin walls, a raucous rock song, something modern he doesn’t know, but the sound, its indication of her comfort level, works where her invitation had not and he steps inside.

The same riot of color and knick-knacks greets him as they had one year ago. He drags his right hand along the back of the couch as he circles into the living room, remembering the battered old monstrosity from the basement of the Colonel’s house, the site of their first few giddy fumbles toward sex. The couch faces not a television but a desk with a sizable computer monitor on top. On the right wall, the one shared with the hallway outside, stands a massive bookcase. Bucky heads for this, drawn like bug to a brilliant, revealing light.

He spots a few new items decorating its surfaces, but it’s the old ones, or the returned ones, that catch his attention. He sees a photo of him and her at her high school graduation, Bucky on leave from Basic and sharp in his uniform. There’s another from about six weeks after Darcy’s run-in with Rumlow, her first trip out of his house, a day trip to the beach with Sam and Sharon, Steve and Peggy, Marlowe and the munchkin. They found a random passerby to take the picture, and Bucky laughs now at the rabbit ears that Darcy to gives Sharon and the matching ones that Sam gives to Steve, kneeling on the ground with little Sarah on his knee. It had been a good day, one of the last before Darcy declared her intent to return to bounty hunting and they, again, fell apart. 

Bucky lets himself linger on the photograph a second longer before turning for the files on the table. The music changes, “Smoke on the Water” drifting out now. He can’t help but shake his head, Darcy’s taste in music inevitably warped by Stark during her childhood. As she starts to sing along, Bucky begins flipping through the papers. He sees the official police reports about Chesterson, the failure-to-appear file from the courthouse, and then others, all of them filled with her loopy handwriting, notes about Chesterson’s life, his bank and credit history, stuff gathered from social media, from interviews with his family and few acquaintances, including one with the infamous Shasta Collins. A few surveillance photos complete the lot, Chesterson in his car, standing outside the mall with, presumably, Shasta, and walking from a gas station, a lit cigarette in hand. 

Deep Purple’s shifted to George Thorogood and “Bad to the Bone” by the time Darcy emerges. “Any thoughts?” she asks, clad now in jeans and boots and an old Soundgarden t-shirt.

Bucky arches a brow when he spots the shirt, which earns him a cheeky grin. He waits for Darcy to pull out the chair opposite him and sit before he says, “You ever thought about being a P.I.? If not, you should. This is good.”

Darcy blinks at him a few times, her expression going slack, then she gives new meaning to the phrase ‘tickled pink’ as her face flushes and a small smile tugs at her lips. “You think so?”

Bucky nods. “Especially for such short notice. You can use these skills there, but you won’t have to worry about dragging in drunk and violent perps all the time.”

Her smile grows, buoying her and him and the space between, only to falter a moment later when she releases a soft sigh. “I have thought about it, but you’ve got to buy the license and see above, re: money. Plus, you need three years experience to even _qualify_ for the test and they don’t count bail bonds as relevant experience. It needs to be with a licensed P.I.”

He hesitates only a moment, restrained by the ghosts of their past, by the last time she walked away. But his promise the night before of helping her figure something out spurs him past his reticence, so he kicks back in his chair and says, grinning, “Then today’s your lucky day, Samus. Because I know someone.”

Her eyes widen and she clutches a dramatic hand to her chest. “Aw. Did you make a friend?”

Now he rolls his eyes. “I did. Her name’s Natasha and she happens to be a P.I. We, uh, we met in group a couple years back.” Bucky averts his gaze as he usually does when he mentions his VA therapy. He reaches for the neon green pen tucked in the crease of one file folder, fiddling with it as he continues. “She used to be CIA, met Steve on some super-secret Seal mission that neither talk about. She and Sam had a thing for a while. Maybe they still do, I don’t know. She’s good people. I can put you in contact with her if you want.”

He gets no response to his offer. Nothing, no dismissive scoff, no sarcastic snort, not even gentle hand pat no. Just absolute silence. Sighing, Bucky tosses the pen back onto the table. “Look,” he begins, but he stops when he looks up to find Darcy gaping at him, both slack-jawed and wide-eyed.

“Are you—”

She waves a panicked hand before him, shutting him up. Then she waves one before herself, like a Southerner at summertime seeking a cool breeze. After a few seconds, Darcy draws in a huge gulp of air, opens her mouth, and squeaks out, “You…”

“Yes?”

“…know Natasha. Natasha Romanov. That Natasha. You know her.”

Bucky leans back in his chair again, his smile resurfacing as the reason for her silence becomes clear. “Yeah. I do.” 

“Red Room Investigations Natasha. That Natasha. That’s the one you know.”

His smile grows. “Yes.”

Darcy resumes her hand waving. “Oh god. Oh my _fucking_ god. This is… This is… _Jesus_.” She leans over the table now, her eyes bright, burning with the fires of worship. “She is… Dude, you don’t even know. Or maybe you do since you actually know her. She is all I aspire to be in this world, sans red hair but with my fuzzy bear slippers in tow.”

“Yeah, she’s—”

“I saw her once. She came to the office to work with Clint on a case. She was…” Darcy shakes her head. She flops back against her chair, dazed from the memory of Natasha, too overwhelmed to complete her thought. “I can’t believe you know her,” she continues, looking at Bucky again. “Like, enough to have her number. This is like knowing someone who knows the Pope.”

He laughs at the hyperbole. “So I take it you want me to call her?”

“Uh, yes. Not that I’m not grateful to Clint for giving me this job,” she adds in quickly, as though Bucky weren’t the founder, president, and cheerleader for the ‘Get Darcy a New Job’ movement. “I am. But I can’t pass this up, not if you think there’s the remotest chance in Hell that she would be my spy Yoda.”

“I do.”

Bucky leaves it at this, though he could say more, though he could reveal what he knows about Natasha and her past, her drive to help young women, to protect them in ways that she was never while growing up. He leaves it at this, though he could say more, though he could lean forward and grasp Darcy by the hand and talk until she believes in her worth, until she realizes what she calls a remote chance is a plum opportunity for Natasha. But Bucky leaves it at this, content with the smile that blooms across her face and hopeful for a future in which he might say more. 

Darcy basks in the possibility of working with Natasha a few seconds longer and then her gaze alights upon Bucky again. “You know,” she murmurs, smiling at him, “I might owe you two pizzas for this.”

Bucky cocks a brow, making no effort to repress the little grin that bubbles forth, soda fizzy and sun bright. “Really? Two pizzas?”

She leans forward. Her eyes slide to the left and to the right, as if checking for eavesdroppers, for interlopers to this miraculous turn, before they peer at Bucky through her lashes. “Maybe three.”

“Three? We might have to—”

The chirp of her phone sounds, interrupting perhaps catastrophe, or perhaps reclamation. Darcy shifts to the side and fishes her phone from the back pocket of her jeans. As she glances at the screen, Bucky breathes in, seeking composure, a steady heart and collected mind. The fierce grin that spreads across her face completely derails all his efforts.

“Shasta?”

Darcy nods. “Right on schedule.” She types out a quick message before standing. Only Artemis herself glowed with more zest for the hunt, Orion once more by her side. “Gear up, Watson. The game, as they say, is on.”

*


	7. Part Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky and Darcy track down Chesterson.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some misogynistic language and references to domestic abuse concerning Chesterson in this chapter. Cluck ‘N’ Bucket may very well be a restaurant; I just wanted a ridiculous generic name. Darcy and Bucky quote Star Wars a few times (ok, a lot). 5-0 (or five oh) is shorthand for the police, in case you didn’t know. Also, I know nothing about official police procedures. I went for drama, not accuracy.
> 
> One last division. The Star Wars conversation became much more involved than I originally intended it to be, so one more part to wrap it all up.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's left feedback and kudos and bookmarked the fic. All of them, but especially the comments, have been wonderful. They truly do make my day, so thank you!

And If I Call for You  
Part Seven

 

The mall looms before them, a wasteland of teenage loiters and vapid commercialism that Bucky attempts to avoid at all costs. Yet here he is, shoulder holster on, nudging out the kickstand of his bike so that he and Darcy can go inside and catch Chesterson before everything, inevitably, went to shit.

Darcy hops down to the ground, doffs her helmet, and shakes out her hair. Bucky allows himself one look, her dark curls gleaming in the midmorning sun, her lips maroon, a deeper red than the cherry she wore the day before, his gaze safely hidden by his helmet, then he, too, steps from the bike, easing off his helmet to wait for the plan. 

“Okay,” Darcy says once he’s lounging against the bike, one hand holding his helmet on the seat. “Shasta works in the food court, at the Cluck ‘N’ Bucket. So he’s gonna be there, trying to live out his sad, little Clyde Barrow dreams. I’ll come from the side of Macy, you come from the side of—”

Bucky starts shaking his head. “No. We’re not splitting up.”

Her lips flatten at his dissent, but she smoothes it away after a moment to say, “We have to. He’s gonna run. That’s what he does. He’s done it to me three times already. And he’s fast, man. Like, deceptively fast for a dumbass. We won’t catch him if we’re on the same side.”

“I’ll catch him.”

Darcy works her jaw to the side. Bucky knows that he’s pushing, but he lets himself push, the bruise on her face still visible despite the makeup she wears. She turns her head away, perhaps hiding the bruise, or maybe just looking for witnesses before she beaned him with her helmet. He watches her draw in a breath then she says slowly, “You said you would help me.”

“And I’m trying to. Not giving him the opportunity to hurt you again is the best kind of help I can think of.”

“He’s not going to hurt me!” she says, looking back at him. “He’s going to be running away, and running toward you, not me.”

“That’s _if_ he runs. And that’s _if_ he’s still in the food court too and not wandering the mall where he can find you alone.”

“He’s going to be at the food court. Shasta said she’d keep him there until we arrived.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, raising his brows. “Shasta said?”

This earns him a glare. Bucky holds up a conciliatory hand before Darcy can yell or, worse, walk away, yet the concession does little to soften her anger. He draws the hand back through his hair and pulls in a deep breath before attempting to explain.

“You’ve found him three times already and found him here just yesterday. And he might be a dumbass like you say he is, but even he’s got to know that you’ll find him again, especially after he vandalized your car. And because of that and because he tried to run you over and because he punched you in the face and shoved you out of a window, he’s got to know that you’ll be pissed, so he’ll likely be prepared.”

The glare fades, but Darcy doesn’t back down. “He can’t carry a baseball bat in the mall.”

“No. But he might have a knife or a gun.”

“Which is why you’re here.”

“I know. So let me be.” 

Darcy tilts her chin up, and with it, the impasse arises between them again. The impulse to push prods at Bucky, fueled by the memory of her trembling the night before, caught in the grip of her night terror. She walked away the last time that he pushed, when he protested her working for Barton again, but not pushing the day before allowed Chesterson to find her, to fight her, to frighten her to the point where she deigned to return to him. 

Bucky draws in a slow breath. Darcy eyes him, wary, as he tries to explain. “I can’t walk away. I called off the APB yesterday, and if I hadn’t, he might not have had the chance to hurt you. So I can’t. Not again.”

“Bucky—” 

“Just let me walk with you to the food court and get the lay of it, then I’ll follow the plan, cross to the other side and keep him from leaving. I promise.”

Darcy lets out a soft sigh. “Look, I get it. I do. And I’m not trying to play superhero here. I’d say the two of us are about even in how little we want Chesterson to hurt me again. But the plan can only work if he doesn’t know you’re there.”

Bucky frowns at her. “How would he know?”

“He’d see you walking. You kind of stand out, dude.”

He tilts his head at her now. “And whose fault is that? ‘You must badass to the most badass of all badass proportions.’” Darcy gives him a look for the sass, but he continues before she can speak, unwilling to concede the point. “And I thought you wanted him to see me so he’d pee his pants in fear.”

“I did. But at the opportune moment. Which is not from halfway across the food court, but when he rounds the corner in his panicked flight, bounces off you like a quarter off your ass, and then face-plants onto the floor after I taze him in _his_ ass.”

Bucky stares at her a moment before raising both his brows. “Like a quarter off my ass?”

A faint blush stains her cheeks. “What? It’s an apt analogy.”

“Is it now? And how exactly would you know that?” He cocks a brow at her, unable to stop the smirk as her blush intensifies. “Been looking at my ass lately?” 

Darcy narrows her eyes at him. “Isn’t that what I should be asking you? Exactly how long were you standing in the alley getting the ‘lay of the land’ before you said something to me?”

Bucky resists the urge to squirm at being caught. Instead, he holds her gaze and plows full speed ahead, dangerous curves notwithstanding. “Not long enough.”

Darcy shakes her head and sighs, but Bucky spots the smile that tugs at her mouth and he blames this for his final push, the hint of a smile and the gleam in her eyes, the way she pressed against him on the bike and the breakfast that morning and the conversation the night before and the way her hand floated across the banister as she walked up the stairs, ‘I never have’ ringing in his ears.

“You asked me to help you,” he says quietly, pushing off the bike to stand before her. “You said that you needed help. So let me help you. What’s the point of bringing me along if you can’t use my skills? And I mean _all_ my skills, not just my ass in tight pants.”

He sends her a small smile, which earns him one of her own. Bucky watches her contemplate his request. She peers at the mall, her lips pursed and eyes narrowed. A few seconds pass then she blows out a loud breath and looks back to him. “Fine. You can get the lay of the land. But bounty hunting ain’t like dusting crops, boy, so after that, you follow my lead.”

She turns for the mall then, but Bucky doesn’t follow. Instead, he gapes. Then he gawks. Then he sputters out, “No. No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not.”

Darcy stops. He hears her sigh from ten feet away, catches a glimpse of her frown as she lowers and shakes her head. “Bucky—”

“Han.”

She looks at him over her shoulder, still frowning. “What?”

“Han,” he says again. “If anyone’s Han Solo here, it’s me.”

Darcy stares at him for a few seconds like she stared at the mall, her lips pursed and her brow creased, then she swivels around, props a hand on her hip, and blurts out, “Bullshit.”

“It’s true,” he says, sauntering forward, his helmet in hand. “I’ve got the charm, the cool ride…”

Her eyes flit up to his hair. “Well, you’re certainly scruffy looking, all right.”

Bucky grins at that. “Thank you.”

“ _But_ ,” she says, falling into step beside him as they head for the entrance, “that doesn’t mean that you’re Han. _I’m_ Han, gender be damned. You,” she pauses then to cock an expectant brow, “are someone else.”

“I will leave you here if you say Jar Jar.”

This earns him a grin. “Not Jar Jar.” 

“Then who?”

Darcy reaches the entrance and pulls open the door, waving Bucky through with a flourish of her helmeted hand. She waits until he passes through, until she’s stepped up behind him in the crisp recycled air to lean in close and say, “You’re the Princess.”

“What?!”

“Yep.” She draws even with him, grinning, gleeful. “Princess Bucky Barnes.”

Bucky narrows his eyes at her. “Maybe I will leave you here.”

“No, you won’t,” she says as she starts forward.

“And why not?”

“Because you’re the Princess, dude. You don’t leave.”

He doesn’t leave, but he doesn’t move either, the sliver of sincerity within her words pinning him momentarily to the spot. He forces himself forward as she peers back at him, trying his best to maintain their light tone as he says, “Gonna need a little more than ‘not leaving’ to buy what you’re trying to sell here, sweetheart.”

Darcy waits for him to catch up with her before she begins. “Han… He’s selfish. A fuck-up. He gets himself in deep with Jabba then leaves the Rebels high and dry to go save his own ass. And the only person who thinks his ride is cool is _him_ , which is, like, the perfect metaphor for his life because half the time the Falcon doesn’t even work, and when it does, it’s only because someone like R2 or Chewie comes along to fix it. But Leia…” She catches his eye again as they round the corner for the mall. “She’s the one who’s got her shit together, even though she’s got plenty of reasons to fall apart. I mean, her whole _planet_ gets blown up in front of her, she gets _tortured_ , by her dad no less, an entire evil Empire wants to murder her, yet she picks herself right back up and kicks all kinds of ass, killing Jabba and getting the Death Star plans and even, you know, rescuing Han.” Darcy directs them toward the escalator, casting him another glance as she does. “Embrace your destiny, young Jedi. You’re the Princess.” She grins at him again, but Bucky sees the strain behind the effort, the dash of solemnity that shadows her gaze.

They step onto the escalator, Darcy ahead of Bucky. She tilts her face in the direction of the food court, scoping out the scene that he demanded to investigate, but Bucky doesn’t follow her lead. Instead, he watches her, debating the wisdom of his instinctive response to her comparison. He restrained himself before in her apartment, limiting himself to a simple confirmation of his belief that Natasha would want to hire her. He hadn’t wanted to push. But Darcy had cracked open the door with the analogy, she’d lighted the path, so he once more takes his first step down, climbing onto the step beside her.

“Han may have been a fuck up,” he says when she meets his eyes, “but he was a good man. He came back and helped them save the day. And he got tortured too, and he picked himself back up and fought on. And, yeah, he needed to be rescued, but Luke, Leia, and the rest of them, they did it because Han had already helped them and they cared about him, not because he was weak.” 

They reach the top of the escalator. Bucky holds her gaze as they step off, as he moves them to the side to say, “The Princess did have her shit together. You’re right about that. So she wasn’t someone who’d just toss everything away on a dud, whether that be a man or a ship. She saw who Han could be if only he believed that he could. So she loves him for a reason.”

Darcy stares at him, wide-eyed. People filter past, the mall beginning to hum with late morning activity, but the world beyond the two of them recedes for Bucky, reduced to him and her and to her reaction to his revelation, to his deliberate blur of fiction and reality, of the past tense for the present. A more oblique confession than his first, a soft admission toward the start of his senior year, the two of them standing on her front porch after dinner with his folks. He’d wanted to say it earlier, first four months in, then six, then eight, but he didn’t, Darcy cynical about love, still smarting from the blow up between her and her dad. She stared at him then as she stares now, in shock at the concept, at its reality, at the idea of someone loving _her_ , or perhaps now at the idea of that someone still being him. Then, three seconds later, the seconds as hours, as years to Bucky, beginning to sweat on the hot September night, though less from the heat and more from the dawning possibility of her rejection, of what Connie Falcone must have felt when she said it to him the summer before their sophomore year and all he could do was stare until she turned and walked away, then Darcy’s hand clamped down onto his and she blurted out, ‘Good. I mean, yes. I mean, I do too. Love you, that is.’

Now Darcy blinks at him, and three seconds becomes five becomes seven becomes ten, and he thinks that maybe he should have waited, Darcy even more cynical about love now, still smarting from their many break ups. The thought solidifies a second later when her eyes narrow, when her gaze intensifies upon him, when ten seconds becomes twelve becomes fifteen, when still she stares, but then Darcy straightens her shoulders and says, moving in so close to him that their helmets bump, “This… right here… This _will_ be continued. After we catch this asshole. So come on,” she continues, easing around him, her eyes bright and her lips curving into a saucy little grin that makes his head spin. “Let’s blow this thing so we can all go home.” 

*

They stop at the edge of the food court to get his desired lay of the land. Bucky angles his body toward Darcy, placing her firmly between him and the wall. She notices the placement and rolls her eyes, giving him a swift poke in the side as she does, but she doesn’t move or make him move, which prompts him to send up a silent prayer to whatever gods of love and bounty hunting that may be observing the scene. 

The imminence of lunch brings a crowd to the court, the chairs and tables nearly half full. Bucky scans the neon signs, spotting the Cluck ‘N’ Bucket right in the middle of the arc of restaurants. He finds Chesterson at a nearby table with an unhappy Shasta, whose gaze, as Bucky looks, darts to the other entrance to the food court. She jumps a second later and her eyes snap back toward Chesterson. The fear that flits across her face at whatever he says makes Bucky’s blood boil.

“How about we forget the plan,” he mutters to Darcy, “and I just go over there and beat the shit out of him?”

“Works for me. However, let’s try to beat him to a tiny pulp _without_ getting you suspended at the same time.”

Bucky turns to her, smiling. “Look at you. Trying to be all mature and shit.”

One corner of her mouth curves into a grin. “Yeah, well, I thought I’d try it out. Got a Princess to impress, you know.”

His smile widens. He may or may not feel warm and fuzzy inside. “Do you now?”

Darcy glances at him then and rolls her eyes at the likely dopey expression on his face. “Oh my god,” she mutters, but the smile on her face belies her consternation, “you are such a sap.”

Bucky starts to back away, still grinning. “You love it.” He continues before the seriousness of the ‘L’ word can depress their banter. “Now, you’ll wait—”

“Until you’re in position, yes. Now go,” she says, shooing a hand at him. “Position. Prepare for one hundred and fifty pounds of domestic abusing asshole to make a bee-line for your bad ass.” 

“You know the sweetest things to say to a man.” 

With that, he turns and begins to cross the food court. Bucky swings out wide, hugging the rail that overlooks the first floor, keeping to a casual mall stroll. The amount of bystanders makes him nervous, it increased the possibility of this going wrong, of someone getting hurt, but letting Chesterson roam free any longer unsettled Bucky even more, and now for Shasta’s safety as well as for Darcy’s. As he passes by an ice cream stand, he chances a glance over. Chesterson still sits at the table, focused entirely on Shasta, bent over in his appeal to her to run away with him. She points with a shaking hand back at the Cluck ‘N’ Bucket and starts to stand, but Chesterson grabs her arm and pulls her back down to the table. Bucky nearly breaks from the plan as she winces, but deviating now would increase the instability of an already tremulous plan, so he increases his speed instead to get to the other side and get this show on the road. 

There, he sets up next to a cupcake shop, placing his helmet down by his feet to leave his hands free for fighting. Peering back across the court, he locks eyes with Darcy, who starts forward at the same casual stroll he had before. Shasta zeroes in on Darcy as soon as she steps around the corner, and her relief is visible even from this far in the way she slumps back against the chair. Of course, Chesterson sees it too and glances back over his shoulder, frowning, and when he too sees Darcy, all hell breaks loose. 

“You _bitch_!” he bellows, lunging for Shasta. Bucky reaches for his gun in his shoulder holster as the table overturns and Chesterson grabs her by the hair. His heart skips a beat as Darcy charges across the food court towards them. Patrons scatter, some screaming, at the brewing fight, and for a few seconds, Bucky can’t see what’s happening, his vision blocked by those fleeing. When he can again, his heart stops altogether, Darcy frozen about twenty feet from Chesterson and a sobbing Shasta, her hands in the air and her eyes on the gun that Chesterson points at her with a shaking hand. 

“You just stop the fuck right there,” he shrieks at Darcy. He tightens his hold on Shasta’s hair and forces her down onto her knees. Bucky can’t see the expression of pain, both Chesterson and Shasta facing away from him, but he hears her cry echo across the food court. “I will blow both you and her away if you take another goddamn step.”

Heart pounding, Bucky grabs his phone from his jacket pocket. He hits one on speed dial. Two rings in, Steve answers.

“What’s up, Buck? Has Darcy got you—”

“We’re at the mall. North-side food court. Chesterson’s got a gun and two hostages.”

There’s a tense moment of silence before Steve says, “Darcy?”

“One of the two.”

Another beat of silence as they both consider the implications of his revelation, of what could happen to Darcy if this standoff went sour, of what Bucky might do if it did, and then Steve says, his voice low and steady, “Peggy’s calling for back up. They’ll be there in ten. Stay calm.” 

“Will do.”

They hang up. As Bucky stuffs his phone back into his pocket, he sees mall security approach. He locks eyes with the one closest to him, a young man named Floyd that he recognizes from a few of his community college classes. Floyd gives a curt nod at Bucky, recognizing him too. Bucky motions to himself then to the food court. Floyd nods and reaches for his radio, informing the other guards of the presence of a cop, then Bucky disengages the safety of his gun and steps forward.

“I trusted you,” Chesterson says now to Shasta. He wrenches her back, and she cries out again, nearly falling to the ground. “I loved you, and you called this bitch on me.”

Darcy shakes her head as Bucky creeps toward them. “She didn’t.”

“Bullshit.”

“Nope. You’re just that predictable, coming back to where you were yesterday.”

Chesterson looks down at Shasta, forcing her head back until she peers up at him. “You called her yesterday, too?”

“She didn’t,” Darcy says again. She keeps her eyes on Chesterson, not on Bucky, who weaves between the overturned chairs and tables, his gun up and waiting for a shot. 

“No?” Chesterson asks, looking back at her. “Then how’d you find me?”

“I didn’t. I’m more… stumbled upon you.” Darcy points to dessert shop behind her. “I was upset after losing you again, so I came for a Tasty Shake. You just happened to be here too.”

Chesterson stares at her. His arm drops a fraction, his will beginning to waver in the fact Darcy’s revelation. Bucky sights him, waiting for him to shift the gun away from Darcy completely.

“I’m not going in.”

Darcy nods. “That’s fine by me. I don’t really care. Your bond’s not worth that much money. I just thought I’d take one last shot at it while I could.”

Chesterson stares at her another moment, silent. Then he says, “What does that mean?”

“It means the 5-0’s looking for you, dude. They’re probably on their way here now. You know one of the screaming banshees called them when they ran.” The pause is near infinitesimal, but still a pause, still a sign of her fear at her manipulation being detected. “If you leave now, you might have a chance to escape before they get here.”

Chesterson says nothing, but he must look past her at the security guards on the other side for she continues softly, “Security’s not going to stop you. Last thing they want is a shoot out.”

Chesterson hesitates. He looks down at Shasta then back up at Darcy. Bucky breathes in, his gun steady, and waits; he waits for Chesteron to lower his gun and to turn to run. Chesterson looks at Shasta again. Seconds pass, and Darcy looks past Chesterson to Bucky, but Bucky keeps his gaze fixed on the wavering man before him, on the gun still in his hand. Another few seconds slide by then Chesterson abruptly shoves Shasta away. Sobbing, she starts to crawl toward Darcy. Bucky takes a step forward. Chesterson turns. His eyes widen when he spots Bucky, and he freezes.

“Police,” Bucky says, his voice snapping with anger. “Drop the gun and get on your knees. Right now.”

Chesterson gapes at him a moment then his face twists dark and ugly. “You lying _bitch_!” 

His scream of rage echoes throughout the food court. He starts to turn, starts to lift the gun again toward Darcy, but Bucky shoots before he gets even halfway back around. Chesterson crumples, the bullet striking him in the right thigh. His gun flies from his hand as he falls, as Bucky rushes forward, aiming for his head.

“Move,” he says, “and the next one goes in your head.”

Chesterson ignores him, too busy groaning on the ground. Bucky kicks his gun away, out of his reach, then he kicks Chesterson onto his stomach, shoving a knee against the small of his back to keep him in place. The security guards close in then, a few going to Shasta to help her to her feet, one to watch Chesterson as Bucky reaches for his cuffs, and another, Floyd, over to the gun, which he lifts with one napkin covered hand.

Bucky swaps his gun for his cuffs, clamping them down tight onto a whimpering Chesterson. As he stands, he casts a quick look at Floyd. “Call for an ambulance.” 

Floyd nods. He hands Bucky Chesterson’s gun then pulls his cell from his pocket. As he does, Bucky turns toward Darcy. She’s pale and more than a little shaken now that the adrenaline from the confrontation is starting to wane, but her gaze is clear and, when they lock eyes, a wavering smile appears on her face.

“See,” she murmurs, looking at him. “Totally according to plan.” 

*


	8. Part Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath of Chesterson.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ‘A priori’ is knowledge that is not from experience while ‘a posteriori’ is knowledge that is dependent upon, or gained from, experience. Which then becomes an ass pun with posterior. A Sisyphean task references Sisyphus and his punishment of pushing a boulder up a hill for all eternity. You should know the source of the final line of dialogue. :)

And If I Call For You  
Part Eight

Head bent over an endless pile of paperwork, Bucky doesn’t notice her until she drops down into the chair beside his desk and, by then, it’s too late. The steady gaze of Sharon Carter, big sister extraordinaire, pins him in place, and all Bucky can do is lower his pen, lean back in his chair, and wait.

He’d lost track of Darcy three hours ago when the action shifted from the mall to the precinct. Under the inquisitive stares of the nosy bastards he called friends and colleagues, Bucky had kept it cool, he’d kept it professional, turning Darcy over to Trip and Skye for a follow-up talk to the previous fight she’d had with Chesterson the day before. After that, Darcy had left for the court to collect her bond. He’d already been at his desk beginning the Sisyphean task before him when he’d heard the snap of gum, glanced up from his desk, and saw her before the door, backlit and gorgeous in the late afternoon sun, her red heart frames in place and a cheeky little grin directed his way. He watched as she lifted her hand to give him a puckish salute, and though Bucky tried, greedy eyes hungry for drama everywhere, he’d been unable to restrain his smile.

At least until Sharon had slid into view next to Darcy, her keys in hand and eyes narrowed and fixed on Bucky.

That had been an hour ago. Now Sharon sits, her head tilted back as she peers down her nose at Bucky. Twelve years vanish as she does, Bucky sixteen again and at the Carters to pick up Darcy for their first date, the Colonel, Peggy, and Sharon all arrayed before him as he sat on the couch. He had thought that the Colonel, naturally, would be the most intimidating, but Sharon snatched that crown with a fierce glare that strove its hardest to set Bucky on fire. Of course, Sharon had also been direct witness to his break-up with Connie six months before, Sharon in her grade and friendly with Connie and thus one of the select few granted access to Connie’s soon-to-be-epic bathroom meltdown in which she’d simultaneously cursed Bucky for being cold and heartless while berating him for his sexual prowess, despite the fact that, the one time they slept together, had been the first time for the both of them.

Twelve years, one war, and two promotions later, Sharon still intimidates.

The stare persists, and Bucky has to fight hard against the urge to squirm. He didn’t when he was sixteen; he wouldn’t now.

He would, of course, stammer like an idiot.

“Did, uh, did everything go, um, okay at the courthouse?”

Sharon nods but says nothing else. 

Bucky clears his throat and forces himself to keep meeting her gaze. “Did you and Darcy, uh… talk?”

Sharon nods again. She tilts her head to the side to regard him from a newer and even more intimidating angle, and Bucky feels himself start to sweat.

“Did you two… talk? About us? Not you and I,” he says quickly. “She— Darcy, you know, and, um, me.”

Sharon nods a third time. She crosses her legs and tilts her head to the other side, slowly raising a brow as she does. All the while, her gaze doesn’t deviate. She stares at Bucky with the intensity that routinely makes perps break down and cry in interrogations. Bucky has to remind himself that he’s a decorated veteran and a newly-made Sergeant and that he just saved Darcy’s life and who knows how many others by taking down Chesterson and that he shouldn’t, no matter how much the impulse prods at him, turn tail and run.

“Sharon—”

“I like you, Bucky. I really do. You’re one of the best cops that I know, and that includes Steve and Peg. But you’re kind of shit when it comes to women. Especially when that woman is my sister.”

Bucky closes his mouth. The truth of the statement lowers his gaze to his desk.

“Now I know some of that is Dee’s fault,” Sharon continues. “The stupidest thing that she’s ever done is staying married to Ian for as long as she did. But she has a hard time admitting when she’s wrong, and an even harder time asking someone for help when she needs it, so the fact that apparently she just did both with you says something.”

His eyes fly back up to Sharon. She sits, as composed as ever, perhaps with a dash of fondness in her eyes, heavily shaded by exasperation.

“Now, because you’re kind of shit when it comes to women, especially when that woman is my sister, and because _she’s_ kind of shit with communicating, especially when she feels vulnerable, I’m going to tell you what you probably won’t let yourself see because you have as many guilt issues as Steve is tall and what Dee probably won’t say because she’s got as many commitment issues as her dad is rich.”

Sharon leans in then, propping both elbows on the corner of his desk to close the distance to two feet. Bucky finds himself breathless as he stares at her, caught as the proverbial deer in the blinding headlights, potentially facing his doom. 

“She loves you. She’s been in love with you since she was fourteen, and I know this because I’m the one that she told when she was fourteen, and when she was twenty and when she was twenty-three. Now, whatever happened between you two the past day has made her the happiest I’ve seen her in about six years.” She pauses, inches forward a bit more, waits until a brave patrolman passes by, lowers her voice a notch, and says with her characteristic intensity and also her characteristic capacity for murder, “You cannot, under any circumstances, fuck that up.”

Bucky blinks at her, too shocked to speak.

“Now I know you won’t intend to,” she says, easing back now. “You’re as nuts over her as she is over you. But you let her walk away. Twice.”

“I didn’t _let_ her,” he says, his shock beginning to give way to anger. “Darcy made her decision. Twice. I respected it.”

“And look where it’s gotten you. Six years of separation.”

Bucky can only glare in response, the truth in her words impossible to deny.

Sharon reclines in the chair in full. She regards him a few moments, her eyes cool and assessing. Then, suddenly, “You know why she did it, don’t you? Why she left?”

“Yes. Now I do.”

Sharon raises her brows. “And?”

“And what?”

“And what did you do about it? Did you let her go on believing that she wasn’t good enough for you because of a goddamn mistake she made when she was nineteen? Because you left her and her dad left her so she must be unlovable?”

His gaze hardens and his hands clench into fists. “No.”

Sharon closes her mouth. She subjects Bucky to another slit-eyed inspection, her foot jiggling in time to the beat of his heart. Then the stone wall breaks and a small smile curves her lips. “Good. There’s hope for you yet, young Jedi.”

Bucky sits, frozen, lagging behind her hairpin turn for acceptance, then everything processes, and he closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “She told you about that?”

“Yep.” 

Sharon does nothing to conceal the amusement in her voice. Looking at her again, Bucky says, “If you tell anyone—”

“Relax. Your nerdery is safe with me. Although,” she continues, narrowing her eyes once more in perusal, “I’m surprised Dee went with Leia for you. If anyone, I would’ve pegged Steve as the Princess.”

Bucky blinks at that. “What?”

“Come on, Bucky. You know this to be true. The noble, self-righteous diva savior of the galaxy? That’s Rogers through and through.”

The corners of his mouth tick up into a grin. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

Sharon cocks a brow. “You mean beside the fact that I covered for you and Dee about a hundred times when you snuck into her room at night?”

“Yes. Besides that.”

She smiles now. “No. You’re not the Princess. You’re not Han either,” she adds as he moves to voice that very thought.

Bucky narrows his eyes at her. “If you say Jar Jar or Jabba or someone equally vile—”

“Yes, because if you were one of them, I’d be sitting here trying to help you and Dee overcome yourselves so you can finally be happy and spare all of us the tragic torment of watching you live with your heads up your butts.”

“Well,” he says after a moment, “when you put it like _that_ …”

“I do.” 

“So who am I then if not Han or the Princess?”

“I take it back. There’s no hope for you yet.”

He stares blankly a few seconds before realization hits and his jaw drops. “Luke?”

Sharon nods. “The angsty knight himself. Small-town golden boy who goes through hell, fights, literally, the darkest parts of himself, and overcomes, a bit darker than before, but with his heart still intact. A heart big enough to save. Because he does save. Not like Leia. Leia’s big picture. Luke… he’s personal. The greater good demands he stay with Yoda, but he goes to save Han and Leia because he cares about them. The same at the end of the third movie. Killing the Emperor’s the smarter choice, but not the moral one. He’s good. Which is why he saves Vader. Plus,” she says, softening the serious scrutiny with a smile, “Marlowe is undoubtedly R2D2.”

The final quip elicits a hint of a smile, but Bucky still finds himself rocked by her assessment. He pulls in a breath, tries to cover with one of his own, “You do realize Han and Luke were never like _that_ , you know.”

“Of course they were.”

Bucky arches a brow at her.

Sharon leans forward again. “I’m serious. It’s Luke who inspires Han to come back in the first movie. And who goes to find Luke when he’s lost on the snow planet? Han. And when Luke has his handstand vision, what’s the first name he says?” Sharon pauses for dramatic effect, though Bucky already knows the answer. “Han. I don’t know what movies you were watching, but Han and Leia weren’t the true love story. That was Han and Luke.” 

She stands then, but doesn’t move away. Instead, Sharon peers down at him, waiting for Bucky to meet her eyes. “The Force is with you, young Barnes. Use it. Don’t let Dee talk herself out of this again. Because if you don’t,” she says as she bends over until they’re eye to eye, until the cold steel of her gaze rests inches from his, “I’ll do more than chop off one of your hands.” 

Her eyes flit down to his crotch then. Bucky feels a dart of fear rush through him. Sharon catches the fear and her mouth curls into a cat-ate-the-canary grin, and this Bucky cannot stand. Tossing an arm over the back of his chair, he sends Sharon his own shit-eating grin as he says, “Will do, Darth Carter.”

“Bucky, if I were Darth Carter, your balls would have been mine six years ago when you broke up with Dee.”

The grin vanishes from his face. “Fair enough. So who are you?”

Sharon straightens and starts to move away, sending him one last pointed look over her shoulder as she goes. “I’m Yoda, dumbass. I’m the only one with any goddamn sense.”

*

There were worse ideas. Probably. Bucky just couldn’t think of them right now, which is why he was Luke and not Yoda. He’s the dumbass who got tricked by R2 and captured by Ewoks and who thought it would be a good idea to go fight Darth Vader while only one-third a Jedi.

He’s the dumbass who was about to climb three stories to Darcy’s bedroom window so he could declare his enduring love. 

Bucky peers up at said window right now and tries not to grimace. Darcy lived on the third floor of her ancient apartment building, one sans balconies or fire escapes or any other easy way to climb as he had climbed to her room in their youth. There was a drainpipe between her window and the building’s edge that would likely rip free as soon as he was ten feet off the ground. There was the portico, which would boost him to the second floor, but only to the second. After that, Bucky would have to use the bricks themselves, the wall old and the mortar worn free in places, which would, theoretically, give him something to hold. 

Theoretically.

Bucky sighs at the thought. Wall climbing had been part of his basic training, but only a small part, and it had occurred nine years ago and hadn’t, of course, been for dilapidated monstrosities that should be condemned at the earliest convenience. He could just pull out his phone and call Darcy, walk up the goddamn stairs like a sane person and ask her out on a second first date. If Becca were here, that’s what she would tell him to do. But she’s not, and twelve years demanded more than just walking up stairs. They demanded grandeur, they demanded insanity, they demanded death-defying heights and epic declarations, they demanded small objects bouncing off his ass and tinkling to the ground between his feet. 

Frowning, Bucky glances down and spots the quarter between his boots, gleaming in the parking lot light. Before he can process further, he hears from behind him, “As a priori so a posteriori. And quite a posteriori it is.”

He smiles at the sound of her voice, at the teasing tone, at the hint of affection softening the words. Crouching down, Bucky grabs the quarter then turns toward Darcy, cocking a brow as he does. “Latin ass puns? Pretty sophisticated for a scruffy looking bounty hunter.”

Darcy grins at him. “Blame Jane. Endless hours of her rattling off Latin-y science to me, some of it sinks in even my brain.” She lifts her hand then and takes a pull from the Tasty Shake cup she holds, chocolate from the color of the straw. Her eyes shine, bright with happiness as she adds, “Q.E.D., your worship.”

“Not ‘your worship.’ The Barracuda says I’m Luke, not Leia.”

Darcy’s eyes widen. “She talked to you? Today?”

Bucky nods.

Darcy stares at him a few moments, frozen, then her hand tightens around the cup and her eyes narrow. “That… _traitor_. She said— Ugh. I am going to kill her so very hard.” She fishes with her other hand for her phone in her jacket pocket, pulling it out a second later.

“Wait,” Bucky says, striding forward. “She didn’t say anything bad.”

Her eyes fly back up to his. “She didn’t?”

Bucky shakes his head. Then he stops, a small smile appearing on his face. “Well, she did say she’d chop off my dick. But for a good reason, not a bad one.”

Darcy raises her brows, but she doesn’t lower her phone. “A good reason?”

Bucky nods. Heart pounding, he closes the distance between them. Her eyes widen again, just a fraction. They search his face, lingering a fraction longer on his lips, but he stays the course, the warning in mind. “She said she would if I fucked this up again. It’s why I came.”

“To fuck it up?” Darcy asks, mischief in her eyes.

“Maybe. I was about two seconds away from climbing the wall to your window when you threw the quarter at my ass.”

Shock slackens her face. Darcy looks from him to her widow and back again. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah.” He looks away as a flush begins to heat the back of his neck. Climbing to her window would have been much cooler in practice. Not so much in theory. In theory, it just sounded nuts. “I probably would have fallen and broken my neck.” 

“Yeah,” Darcy says, and the amusement in her voice brings his gaze back up to her. “Especially since my stupid window only opens, like, three inches.”

His flush deepens. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.” The smile returns to her face, warm and soft, as she slides the phone back into her pocket. “So what would you have done?” she asks, taking another sip of her Tasty Shake. “After successfully Romeo-ing, I mean.”

“You mean _if_ I didn’t fall and _if_ you didn’t taze me upon entry?”

She grins at him again. “Yep.”

“Well,” Bucky says, pulling in a deep breath. “ _If_ I didn’t die and _if_ I wasn’t tazed, I would have said…” He pauses again and draws in a second breath, not from nerves because they said what they needed to say, both their apologies and their affirmations of feelings, but from confirmation, from possibility, from hope, from faith, becoming a reality. “I would have said,” he begins again, reaching for her hand, “that I have loved you for twelve years and that I love you now and that I don’t want to lose this, us, not again. People don’t get second chances, much less a third, but that’s what we’ve been given, so we should take it. Even if we’re afraid or if other people disapprove, we should take it because we deserve it. Both of us.” He pauses then and a wry smile appears on his face. “I may or may not have kissed you then. Depending on the distance between you and your taser.”

Darcy laughs at that, a little gasping sob of a laugh that nudges possibility another step closer to reality. “See,” she says, squeezing his hand, “this is why you’re not Han. Because I was just gonna call you to see if you wanted to get that beer and pizza and maybe, you know, make out some after.” She looks at him and smiles. “I like yours better.”

He glides his thumb across the back of her hand, brilliant inside, prism bright. “I don’t know,” he murmurs. “Yours certainly has its appeal.”

Her smile turns cheeky. “It does, doesn’t it? So why don’t we compromise? We do mine first and then we do yours. Sans the window climbing,” she adds, a dash of sobriety shading her buoyant gaze. “Because I kind of like unbroken us. I’d like to keep that for as long as possible.”

Bucky nods, his throat thickening with emotion. “Me, too.”

Darcy nods too. Tears appear in her eyes, and she draws in a shaking breath. Bucky reaches out with his free hand and cups the side of her face; he smoothes his thumb across her cheekbone and threads his fingertips through a few strands of her hair. Darcy turns her head into his hand. Her chest hitches, and the breath catches in her chest as she swallows hard. Bucky leans in then and kisses her temple, the soft swell of her cheek by his hand, breathing her in, reveling in the feel of her before him, in the reality of her and him and of them together again. The milkshake drops as Darcy grabs hold of his jacket; she turns her head away from his hand and into his kiss. He shivers at the feel of her mouth upon his, the kiss lush yet chaste, desperate and searing, a promise that he tries his best to affirm. Darcy moves, branding first his cheek and then the edge of his jaw with kisses of equal intensity before she buries her face in the crook of his neck. She winds her arms around his shoulders; Bucky mirrors the gesture, drawing her in as close as he can, rubbing his palm in a slow circle over her back when he feels her start to tremble.

“I love you,” she whispers into his ear. “I do. I do. I always have. Bucky, I—”

He nods, understanding what she cannot say, the immensity of this, this third time, this promise they’ve exchanged, their charm, not their downfall, their hope and their future, clear and present to him too. He kisses her shoulder, the side of her head, the shell of her ear, lingering there to avow, “I know.” 

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so very much to everyone who has commented on this story. I love this little verse so much, and your comments, reactions, and overall support has meant the world to me. I hope you liked the final installment (and forgive me for the delay). The door is definitely open for a return to this verse, but now I must finish the last two chapters of "And The Wounded Sing." Thank you again for the love and encouragement! :D


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